by Robert Gott
Mother went upstairs to bed. Brian and I decided that there was little we could do unless we discovered the names of some of John Gilbert’s contacts. Cloris had said that he never mentioned anyone and that his social life was a mystery to her — he never told her where he was going, or who he was going to see, and he’d never brought any of his friends to the house. The police had been through his bedroom, but still, I thought, if Brian could get a look in there, he might find something they’d missed, something they’d ignored as irrelevant but the significance of which Cloris might recognise. That was Brian’s next task. I, meanwhile, would discreetly question the women who shared Geraldine’s dressing room, and I’d question her understudy. If Geraldine used drugs, which I doubted, someone must know.
Lying on my bed, I could smell Geraldine’s hair, or the soap she used to wash it with, on my pillow. It struck me forcefully that the place she would return to in her distressed state was her room in Fitzgibbon Street. Could I bring myself to cross the park and attempt to gain entry one more time? The prospect was a depressing one, but she’d asked me for help, and I couldn’t in good conscience ignore her desperate plea — and it had been desperate. There’d been something terrible in her voice, something that suggested she was in great danger. I didn’t have a choice. It was ludicrously risky; so risky, in fact, that I felt unequal to doing it alone. I knocked on Brian’s bedroom door, and when he called, ‘Come in,’ I discovered him naked, touching his toes, facing away from the door.
‘Most people would have said, “Just a minute please.”’
‘But I knew it was only you.’
‘I need you to get dressed, and come with me to Geraldine’s house. She’d have gone there after leaving here. Where else would she go?’
Brian straightened up and looked sceptical.
‘Geraldine’s house? Again? That can’t be wise.’
‘It wouldn’t be if I returned alone. But with two of us, we might get somewhere.’
‘Or it might be twice as unwise.’
‘She was in a drugged state, Brian. She can’t have been thinking clearly. All her instincts would direct her to the safety of her room. She’ll be there, and I need to talk to her.’
“I suppose that makes a kind of sense.’
‘There’s no moon. It’s as black as pitch outside. No one will see us.’
Brian dressed quickly and took a torch from a drawer. In a few minutes, we were negotiating the dark paths of Princes Park, and sticking to them. Tumbling into an air-raid trench and breaking a leg wasn’t part of my plan. It took just over fifteen minutes to reach Fitzgibbon Street. It was a street that still took the blackout seriously. The local air-raid warden would have been well pleased — not so much as a chink of light escaped from any of the houses. We stood opposite Geraldine’s house, and stared through the darkness at its outlines. Further down the street, someone lit a cigarette at a front gate. The match flared with brightness, magnified by the absence of light. A husband banned from smoking indoors? A soldier waiting for his girl to come out of the house? It was a man. The brief glow revealed that much, but he was too far away for us to determine anything else.
‘What if he’s watching the house?’ Brian said.
‘Then he’s a nong for lighting up. Besides, he’s too far away to be able to see anything happening at Geraldine’s house.’
‘So what do we do now?’
‘The back door is always unlocked. I think the lock must be broken. If you go down the side of the house, you can get to the back door without being seen.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I want you to go inside, Brian. Why do you think you’re here? I’ve already done this twice. If I do it again and get caught, the police will lock me up — and I don’t have an understudy.’
The end of the cigarette in the distance glowed as the smoker took a drag.
‘I’ll go round the back,’ Brian said, ‘just to check the place out, but I’m not sure I want to go inside. I mean, if Geraldine is there, what do I say to her?’
‘You have to go inside, Brian. Obviously, if there’s anyone in the kitchen, or wandering about in the back yard, you won’t make yourself known. Mrs Ferrell is a hair-trigger hysteric, and so is the other boarder. Geraldine’s bedroom is at the top of the stairs, next to the bathroom.’
‘What if she starts screaming?’
‘She’s not the type. Besides, she’s met you. You’re not a stranger. If she’s there, and conscious, tell her I’m out here and ready to help her. Tell her she’s welcome to stay at Mother’s house. She’d be safe there.’
‘Well, not safe from Mother.’
‘Will you please stop talking, and find Geraldine?’
Brian crossed Fitzgibbon Street. As far as I could tell, there was no twitch of the curtain. I saw Brian disappear down the side of the house. I was squinting into the darkness and noticed peripherally that the red glow of the cigarette had moved a couple of houses closer. The smoker took a deep drag and flicked the butt into the road, where it sparked as it hit the asphalt before going out. I smelt him, which was when I realised that he’d moved swiftly towards me — so swiftly that the blow to my stomach bent me double before I could see who my assailant was. I saw his shoes, and felt the blow to the back of my head. Before I lost consciousness, my last thought was, Why do people keep hitting me?
When I woke, I was sitting, propped considerately against the fence of the house opposite Geraldine’s house. I was nauseated, and crawled on all fours the couple of feet it took to get to the nature strip, where I was sick. My head was pounding, and I could feel that my hair was sticky with blood. I tried to stand up, but the vertigo made me very queasy, so I sat back down. I had no idea how much time had passed. Who was the smoker? He couldn’t possibly have recognised me from where he’d been standing initially, or even from a single house away. Was it random? I felt for my wallet. It was still there. I checked its contents. There’d been £5 in it, and that was still there, along with my identification papers. So it wasn’t robbery. And if it wasn’t robbery, then it was personal, and if it was personal, it had something to do with Geraldine.
I was suddenly struck with anxiety about Brian. What had I sent him into? I took a deep breath and got to my feet. I was uncertain, and my first few steps were tentative. I crossed the road, and leaned against the gatepost of Geraldine’s residence. Despite the throbbing in my head, I strained to hear any sound from within the building. Nothing. Although, was that the sound of furniture falling over? And breaking glass? I moved as quickly as I could up the front steps to the veranda, and tried the front door. To my utter astonishment, it opened, and I stepped into the hallway. The smell of bad cooking and inefficient drains hit me. There were no lights on anywhere in the house. I knew that this was probably the worst place in the world for me to be. What choice did I have, though? Brian may well have been in danger. I was trembling. I’d like to put it down to my body’s reaction to being assaulted, but it was certainly at least partly the result of fear.
As I stood there in that dark, malodorous hallway, I thought how ghastly it was. How could Geraldine live here? I’d thought it stale, tired, and unpleasant when I’d first come here with her. Now all its shadows sheltered unknown horrors. The rational part of me knew that my imagination was breaking free of its sensible moorings, but I couldn’t rein it in, and when a figure emerged from the kitchen, I gasped and fell back against the front door, slamming it shut with a thunderous, nerve-shattering bang.
‘For fuck’s sake, Will! Why don’t you let off fireworks to alert the whole of Parkville that we’re breaking into someone’s house?’
I almost fainted with relief. Fortunately, Brian’s obvious annoyance prevented me from giving him a hug — something I’d never done before.
‘Brian.’ I couldn’t immediately think of anything to add to this.
‘If there’d been anybody
here, we’d now be in serious trouble,’ he said. ‘We need to leave here. Now.’
Feeling slightly disoriented, and in a state of shock, I allowed Brian to usher me out the front door, into Fitzgibbon Street, and from there to nearby Royal Parade. I thought I was going to be sick again, and I asked Brian to stop for a moment before we crossed into Princes Park. I sat in the gutter, which surprised him, and when I leant forward and put my head in my hands, he noticed that my shirt collar was bloodied.
‘You’re bleeding. Why?’
‘The smoker whacked me not long after you’d gone inside. And before you ask, the only part of him I saw were his shoes. He may have been a soldier.’
‘Did he smell of sweaty wool, or cologne?’
‘He smelt of cigarette, although when I think about it, maybe there was something sweetly scented behind it. I saw the bottom of his trousers. They were neatly pressed. Yes. There was a sharp crease. He was an American soldier.’
‘Do you know any American soldiers who’d want to hit you over the head? One of those soldiers who came to lunch went to see you in Mother Goose. Was it a delayed, critical response to your acting?’
‘That isn’t the least bit amusing, Brian. I may have concussion. He could have killed me.’
‘He was there before us. He must have been watching the house.’
‘The house. Geraldine.’ My mind was working sluggishly. ‘What did you find in the house?’
‘The only thing I found was you. There was nobody there, and all the doors were locked — except the bathroom, and there wasn’t a body in the bath. I’m assuming there was no one home. There were no lights on, and the house was silent. Why would they be sitting in their rooms in the pitch dark?’
‘The front door was unlocked.’
‘Carelessness? You should report your assault to the police.’
‘Oh, yes, that’d look good. Strachan would love to hear that I’d gone back to Geraldine’s house, even after he’d slugged me.’
‘Good point. We’ll add it to the list of things we need to solve. We’re just getting busier and busier.’
‘I want to go home to bed, Brian. None of this makes any sense, and my head hurts, and my eye hurts.’
‘Well, all right, but just so long as you know that it won’t be all right in the morning.’
Brian was correct, of course. It wasn’t all right in the morning. My eye was badly, embarrassingly bruised, and my head both ached and stung at the place where the blow had broken the skin. Both Brian and Mother had gone out by the time I came downstairs. I was glad. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I made myself a cup of black tea. I’d trained myself to drink it without milk or sugar, as these items had become expensive and scarce, and they were commandeered by Mother for the purpose of baking cakes for soldiers in distant lands. I’m not sure how thrilled I’d be to open a care package to discover a piece of Mother’s flavourless fruitcake. Mother was an excellent cook, but an indifferent baker. The precision required brought out the anarchist in her, and anarchy is the enemy of a fluffy sponge, or a moist fruitcake.
Geraldine’s house had, in my mind, assumed an importance beyond being the place where she lived and from which she’d disappeared. That smoking watcher confirmed this. He was an American soldier. The more I thought about it, the more certain of this I was. Might he have been either Anthony Dervian or Harlen Quist? These were the only American soldiers I knew, but I couldn’t see how the attack on me could possibly have been personal. After all, it would have been impossible to identify me from where he’d been standing, and his approach had been so swift that the decision to strike me had been made without regard to identity. He’d seen someone outside Geraldine’s house, and for him, that was sufficient motive to attack. Why? It occurred to me suddenly, as I gingerly pressed against the discoloured skin below my eye, that the assumption that Geraldine was the cause of these disturbances might be an incorrect one. What if it had nothing to do with her at all, but was rather the result of activities engaged in by either Geraldine’s hysterical, fellow boarder or by her equally hysterical landlady — or, indeed, by both of them in concert? We needed to investigate both these women.
As I walked into town, I prepared a story to cover my black eye. I concocted an unimaginative walking-into-a door-in-the-middle-of-the-night scenario. I thought, too, about Mrs Ferrell, the landlady. I’d never seen her. Geraldine had called her a termagant, but had said little else about her. It was difficult to construct any sort of criminal profile with nothing to go on beyond screams issuing from behind a closed door.
After the performance, which went well (and the audience was now noticeably female-heavy), Percy Wavel called all the cast onstage and gave us the bad news that we’d be expected to do a night-time performance on New Year’s Eve — at Puckapunyal, of all places. I was fortunate in not being attached to the Tivoli shows. Many of the Mother Goose cast were exhausted by the number of performances they’d been required to give. Sunday, for example, ought to have been a day off, because theatres were closed. But Mr Wallace Parnell, the manager of the Tivoli, expected his players to entertain audiences six nights a week on the stage, and on Sunday nights to perform on radio. It was an exhausting regime. I was gaining a new respect for even my least favourite Tivoli comedians and singers. The Dunstan Sisters were spared the Sunday-night radio spot. They were exclusively a visual horror.
So we were to lose New Year’s Eve as a holiday. At least I knew that I wouldn’t need to go looking for Geraldine when we were at Puckapunyal. There were mutterings of discontent before the cast had to hurry off to the Tiv for the evening show. I was obliged to attend the stage door and sign autographs, and somehow my black eye excited admiration rather than disdain. I assured the fans that I’d come by it honestly while helping a fellow actor rehearse a fight scene. They cooed in sympathy.
I was sufficiently concerned about my stubborn headache to visit the family doctor in his rooms in Carlton. It was late when I arrived there, and the surgery was closed. However, Dr Spittler had been treating our family since I was a baby — I believe it was he who performed my circumcision, at the cost of three shillings (my mother kept the receipt; I have no idea why) — and he was very attached to Mother. He was a bachelor, and lived in the house above his rooms. I wasn’t especially fond of Dr Spittler. The last time I’d called on his services, it had been for him to remove the cast from my broken arm after I’d returned from Maryborough, in Queensland. His sage, medical advice on that occasion had been that I should try to avoid falling over. He’d also reminded me, pointedly, that Mother had almost died having me, and that this imposed an obligation on me not to be a disappointment to her. Perhaps the Catholics were onto something with that St Monica nonsense.
Dr Spittler took me upstairs to his living room. He employed a woman who ‘did’ every day, so the house was neat and spotless. As always when I looked at Dr Spittler, I had trouble imagining him as a young man. He had the sort of face that looked as if it had been fixed as an old one from a young age. The room smelled oppressively of cigarette smoke, and Dr Spittler practically lit one cigarette from another. His fingers, which probed both my black eye and the wound on the back of my head, were tanned with tar. He’d been a doctor for so long that he’d exhausted curiosity about his patients long ago, and he didn’t ask how I came to have such injuries. I volunteered what was essentially the truth — that I’d been punched in the eye at one point in the evening, and hit with a blunt instrument later that same evening.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well, I don’t think you’re concussed. Perhaps you twisted your neck when you fell. Why don’t you take up smoking? That might help.’
I paid him, and went home to Mother’s house.
Chapter Six
TURNS FOR THE WORSE
I SLEPT FITFULLY. I ought to have reported Geraldine’s appearance to the police. Her immediate disappearance, however, put me in an awkw
ard spot. I felt a terrible dread that she would be found dead somewhere, and when this thought insinuated itself into my mind, it arrived with the ungracious suspicion that Geraldine may have taken something from my bedroom — an object which, if found on her body, would incriminate me. Those drawings were the source of this unbidden suspicion. I got out of bed, switched on the light, and searched my room. Was there anything missing? I had few belongings. As a travelling actor, I’d shed rather than accumulated things. There were a few photographs, but they all seemed to be there, although I couldn’t be sure. It had been a while since I’d looked through them.
I had one small, talismanic object from my childhood, tucked away under my socks, in a drawer. Its intrinsic value was close enough to nothing, and no one but I knew its value to me. It was a small, white, ceramic bird, no bigger than a glass marble. It was a piece of clay, worked quickly with thumb and fingers, pushed into a plump, generalised bird shape, with a beak and wings delineated with a thumbnail. Painted, glazed, and fired, it was a simple, perfect object. I can’t remember how I came by it. It had appeared at some stage in my childhood, and I loved the way it sat in the palm of my hand. This small bird was the most private part of me. When I travelled, I never took it with me. I didn’t consider it a lucky object. It was more powerful than that. I always buried it, wrapped in a small square of cloth, in Mother’s back yard, and exhumed it when I returned home. I can’t explain why I did this, or why I’d invested so much meaning into this small orb of fired earth. It was there, under the socks. Even if Geraldine had been looking for something to take, there was nothing about my bird that would attach it to me. I don’t believe any other person even knew of its existence. I picked it up, closed my fingers over it, and felt calm — well, calmer.
As soon as I’d put it back in a corner of the drawer, the dread about Geraldine’s corpse returned. It wasn’t, however, Geraldine’s corpse that turned up in the morning. It was an altogether more unexpected body.