by Marele Day
‘Nothing special,’ she said, delivering her verdict in a blase tone of voice. They kept moving, slowly, waiting for their friend buying the icecream. They looked in other windows. They weren’t serious buyers, they were just using the Plaza as a more interesting way of getting to the station.
They were almost out the other side when the pudgy-faced girl looked over her shoulder in the direction of the icecream shop. ‘Tamara’s going to miss the train if she doesn’t hurry.’
‘She’ll catch up,’ said Kerry. ‘C’mon, let’s go, Gula.’ The girl hesitated, torn between Tamara and Kerry. She followed Kerry. Into the station and down the ramp to the platform.
The few adults waiting for the train were far outnumbered by schoolkids. Not that that made me feel conspicuous. As far as the kids were concerned, adults were just part of the scenery. Like the benches, or the waiting rooms. They were there but completely outside the intrigues of the kids’ world.
There was a bunch of pimply-faced boys in maroon jackets talking to the girls. Standing there in their long trousers, five foot tall trying to look six foot. The hand on the hip holding the blazer open, developing the swaggering kind of gait that would serve them well at the bar, the pub kind as well as the court kind. The pudgy-faced Gula suddenly went all giggly in the presence of these budding representatives of the opposite sex. The girls and boys bantered friendly insults back and forth. But Kerry showed little concern or interest. In fact, she appeared downright bored. The boys seemed wary of her, as if they instinctively knew she had it all over them.
There was a whoosh of breeze—a train approaching. Kerry looked down the line towards the city, the direction the train was coming from, then asked casually: ‘Where’s Tamara?’ The other girls stopped flirting with the boys. Kerry had spoken. They looked around, at the entrance to the platform, anxious expressions on their faces. If Kerry was even the slightest bit worried, then they were too. The train was pulling in, slowing to a pneumatic halt. I folded my newspaper under my arm, a natural enough gesture if you’re catching the train, and watched Kerry’s face. She was still looking back towards the ramp. The doors of the train had parted now and people were getting off, trying to push their way past the throng of schoolkids crowding through. ‘Honestly!’ exclaimed a frustrated older woman, shoving her shopping past the kids who threatened to engulf her.
Except for Kerry, the others had forgotten all about Tamara. Their consuming interest at the moment was storming their way onto the train. My eyes flicked between Kerry’s face and the entrance to the platform, saw real anxiety as she searched for the stray member of her flock. Is this the way it had been with Madalena? She stopped for an icecream then simply disappeared?
Kerry’s face relaxed as Tamara came running down the ramp, icecream in hand, ponytail flying behind her. ‘Jesus, Tamara,’ said an exasperated Kerry. ‘There was a queue,’ Tamara explained feebly. She looked at Kerry, wondering what the big deal was. ‘Go on,’ said Kerry, closing off the conversation, ‘get on the train.’
It wasn’t necessary for me to stay on the train with her, I knew where she’d be getting off. Riverwood, the end of the line. I went back for the car and drove to Riverwood station. It was getting busier but it was still a little early for the full force of peak hour.
A bus pulled into Riverwood station and shuddered to a halt. The driver spread his newspaper out over the steering wheel and began to read, seemingly oblivious to a small grey-haired lady tapping on the door. No way he was going to open that door. He was off-duty, even if it was for only a few minutes.
I got out of the car and sat in the bus shelter, next to an enormously fat man who took up half of the bench that was built to accommodate four people. Despite the grey-haired lady’s insistent tapping, the bus driver remained mute. Eventually she stopped and approached the bench. Usually when someone goes to sit on a public bench, those already on it move along to make room. I squeezed up beside the man but this man’s mass remained immutable. I vacated the space altogether. Prolonged body contact with an unattractive stranger is not my favourite way of passing time.
The lady sat down, smiling in recognition of my good deed. The bus driver glanced at his watch then went back to the paper.
The lady dug into her voluminous bag and pulled out a book, The Principles of Russian Formalism. She’d only just opened the book when we heard the rumble that heralded the imminent arrival of the train. The bus driver folded the paper up and put it away. As the train pulled into the station he started the bus up and wheezed open the door. Quick as a flash the grey-haired lady sprung up.
I watched the people getting off the train. Hardly any schoolkids alighted, only Kerry and one of the boys in the maroon blazers. She gave him a cursory wave and he lurched off in the opposite direction. Kerry sauntered to the bus. She was in no hurry. The school hat was now perched right back on her head, her gloves were off and so was her belt. It was as grungy as you could get a uniform that was designed to be neat and ‘ladylike’. She showed the driver her school pass and went up the back of the bus.
The fat man was in front of me, fiddling in his pockets. Eventually he produced a stream of coins and the driver processed the ticket. I asked for a $2.50 fare. Peakhurst, where Kerry lived, couldn’t be any more than that. I went up to the very back seat. Kerry was sitting, feet propped up, gazing out the open window. She didn’t even give me a second look. The seat beside her was empty, as was most of this section of the bus. She was on her own now, no school, no group of admirers. No Madalena.
I watched Kerry the whole way to Peakhurst. She chewed her fingernails, gazing out the window, looking at nothing in particular. Then she pressed the button, indicating she wanted the next stop, and stood up. I did too.
I watched her open the gate and walk up a path either side of which grew weeds and a few stalky geraniums gasping for water. There was a verandah of weathered floorboards with a couple of black garbage bags sitting near the front door. The house looked like no-one lived there. She turned the key in the lock and went in.
NINE
I, William Kirby, a registered medical practitioner, carrying out my profession at the New South Wales Institute of Forensic Medicine in the State of New South Wales do hereby certify as follows:
At 8.00 hours, on the 26th day of April, 1985 at Sydney in the said State, I made a postmortem examination of Guy Francis VALENTINE.
The body was identified to Mr P. Kennedy of the New South Wales Institute of Forensic Medicine by Sergeant Hindley of Kings Cross Station as that of Guy Francis VALENTINE aged about 55 years.
The body was identified to me by the wristband marked 045197.
The forensic assistant in this case was Miss S. Theodourou.
I had in front of me more information about my father now he was dead than I ever had when he was alive. Or at least, information about his body, in microscopic and macroscopic detail.
‘EXTERNAL EXAMINATION’ gave the body weight and length, body mass index and stated that ‘the body was that of a middle-aged male of approximately stated age. Postmortem lividity was present on the front.’ Lividity. After a person dies, the blood pools in those areas in touch with the surface on which the body is lying. He died lying face down.
The description of injuries included minor cuts, abrasions, contusions, an old surgical scar on the abdomen. And a skull fracture.
‘INTERNAL EXAMINATION’—head and neck, cardio-vascular system, respiratory system, gastro-intestinal, hepato-biliary, haemopoietic, genito-urinary and finally the endocrine system. Specimens of tissue were retained for histology and blood for storage.
Facts. More chilling in their clinical objectivity than a lurid description.
I thought that visiting my father’s grave would be enough to lay the ghost to rest but it wasn’t. First of all, there wasn’t a grave to visit, just a plaque on a brick in a wall. Second, you could know everything there is to know about a person’s life but it’s still not enough to bring them back from the dead.
I was gathering documentation, visiting places. Somehow the attempt to lay the ghost to rest was becoming a case. A case in which I was both detective and client.
If I’d peeled back the layers of reasoning I might have found the real reason I was doing this-my own guilt and regret at never making serious attempts to find him while he was alive, despite the lip service I paid to that search. But peeling back the layers didn’t happen till later, till events took the turn they did.
The deaths I come across in my line of work are rarely natural causes or accidental. Even taking into account my propensity to jump to the most suspicious conclusion, by the third time I’d read this postmortem document I didn’t like it any better than the first time I read it.
I invited Lucy to lunch and brought with me the documents I’d obtained from the Institute of Forensic Medicine. I gave Lucy the postmortem report to read, minus the cover sheet which identified the body.
Lucy Lau wasn’t a specialist in forensic medicine, she was a doctor with the Allergy Centre at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, but she would at least know the meaning of the words. I kept having to go to a dictionary and then half the words weren’t there. We went to a tiny downmarket restaurant in Dixon Street, one of those places that have faded photos of the dishes pasted to the inside of the window. It was mostly noodle soup in various guises, with the solid meals all resembling crumbed pork chops.
While I fished around in my soup sorting the solids into known and unknown, Lucy managed to read the report, turning the pages with one hand and scooping pieces of fish and vegetable into her mouth with the other. Lucy was a busy person. Even when she wasn’t busy she ate like a busy person. She had a quick metabolism, the food hardly touched the sides before it was being converted into the energy that fuelled this little fireball.
Once I’d put aside those rounds of white rubber edged in bright pink, the seafood equivalent of Spam, I watched Lucy’s face. Quite frankly, I didn’t think I could have eaten while reading this kind of material, but Lucy didn’t miss a beat. When she got to the last page, she briefly referred to something in an earlier page then pushed the report aside. She frowned as she noticed that the only thing left in her bowl was a single bean sprout in a sea of chicken consomme. She exchanged her chopsticks for a spoon. ‘Looks like the guy hit his head, fell in the water and drowned,’ she announced. She put the ceramic spoon to her mouth and delicately drank the broth. ‘Of course, there is always the possibility that he was pushed. Is it murder you’re looking for?’
‘Not particularly. I just want to get a general feel for the circumstances surrounding the death.’
Lucy had finished her soup now and was looking around for an ashtray. The woman who served us placed an anodised metal ashtray on the table. She lit her cigarette and drew back deeply. ‘Only at mealtimes now,’ she pointed out to me. ‘They make it so difficult, I feel like a leper.’ She looked at me quizzically. ‘Is my smoking bothering you?’
‘No.’
‘What then?’
‘The subject was presumed to be an alcoholic. I expected the body to show more signs of damage.’
‘Well, I certainly wouldn’t have said so on a superficial reading. Normal brain. Nothing remarkable about the liver. Those are the places where alcohol damage usually shows up.’ She flipped over pages of the report and quoted. ‘The liver weighed 2850 grams. Some congestion.’
‘What’s the “some congestion”?’ I asked.
‘Mucus, fat, alcohol, pollution, whatever. With any guy that age you’d expect some congestion. If you or I died tomorrow they would probably find “some congestion”, but with an alcoholic there’s normally more extensive damage than what’s reported here. Maybe he was lucky, or perhaps he was reformed and the liver had repaired itself.’ She flipped over to the pathology sheet, and pointed out the blood alcohol level to me. ‘If he was reformed, he busted the night he died. That blood alcohol level wouldn’t have passed the Random Breath Test.’ She stubbed out the cigarette and moved the ashtray to a neighbouring empty table.
He was over the limit but not a lot over. Not so bad that he’d fall unconscious into the harbour and not be able to get out again. The skull fracture. Maybe somehow he’d fallen and hit his head in such a way that it knocked him unconscious. But he’d just fall to the ground. To fall into the harbour he’d have to have been walking along the seawall. A fifty-five year old man walking along the seawall like a kid doing a balancing act. It didn’t ring true to me, even a drunk fifty-five year old man.
But there was much much more to it than that. I felt as if I had pulled a loose thread and everything had started unravelling. The whole fabric was coming undone. The whole story that had been woven about my father. Maybe all that stuff about my father being a dero was a myth, a fabrication, a story Mina had told herself and I told myself, a blanket to soften the impact of the hard truth. Because if he wasn’t a dero, if he wasn’t an alcoholic, if he was alive and well and living in Sydney, why had he never tried to contact us? To contact me. Whenever my mother told me the story about him, which wasn’t often, it always ended with ‘and we never heard from him again’. Then she’d shut her mind as firmly as one shuts a book when the story is finished.
I replaced the missing top page of the report. Lucy gave it a cursory glance then looked at it hard. ‘Your father? I’m so sorry, Claudia.’
The woman serving us came and asked if we wanted anything else. ‘Just the bill,’ I said.
‘Claudia,’ said Lucy, ‘one of my uncles, when he died, this woman and a teenage boy turned up at the funeral. She was married to my uncle and the boy was his son. But this uncle was married to my mother’s sister, they had five daughters. No-one knew about this other wife and the boy. You can imagine the family’s surprise. Sometimes it’s not till someone dies that we find out the truth about their life.’
William Kirby, a registered medical practitioner, carrying out his profession at the New South Wales Institute of Forensic Medicine in the State of New South Wales, had now retired but he’d agreed to see me at his home.
His home, on Sydney’s North Shore, was quite large. There was a lawn out front so green and immaculate it looked like artificial turf. Along the driveway was a stand of roses as brilliant as any you’d see in the Royal Botanic Gardens. He was watering them as I pulled up outside. He didn’t look up till I closed the car door behind me. He was neatly dressed: cream slacks, white long-sleeved shirt, and a big garden hat. By the look of the skin cancer scars around his nose, he should have started wearing the protective clothing years ago.
I stood at the top of the driveway. Inhaling in long slow draughts, letting the scent of roses swish around whatever the smell equivalent of tastebuds are. I felt almost drunk. No wonder bees dive madly from flower to flower. How could he stand there idly watering? I allowed myself one more inhalation.
‘Dr Kirby?’
‘Come in,’ he invited me down the garden path. The path was edged with low-growing flowers in shades of pink and red. If they had a perfume at all it was overwhelmed by the roses. He turned the tap off and rolled up the hose. ‘I could get one of those sprinklers,’ he said, ‘but it wastes water. Besides, I like watering by hand, the spray is invigorating. Negative ions, you know.’ I knew but I let him tell me anyway. He seemed to be one of those distinguished elderly gents who like to spout knowledge. Which is just what I wanted him to do. ‘Come around the back,’ he said, ‘we can sit down there.’
The back garden was full of roses as well. The man was obsessed.
‘Cleopatra had her bedroom knee-deep in rose petals. Any movement in the room, a light breeze through a window, the idle play of her hand, and more exquisite perfume would be released. She and Antony copulated, drowning in the ecstacy of bruised rose petals. Coffee?’
I wondered what he talked about when he really got to know you. I accepted the offer of coffee and sat down at a wooden table on the back verandah. He went inside. There was a rattling of cups. He came back out again with
a tray of coffee and little crescent-shaped biscuits covered in icing sugar.
‘We just don’t have a vocabulary of smell as vast and intricate as the vocabulary for the other senses,’ he said. ‘The appreciation of smell occurs in the limbic brain, not the intellect. I have spent a lifetime dissecting, analysing and naming. I find the fact that smell eludes our attempts to define it enormously satisfying, don’t you?’
‘Mmm,’ I murmured. Sure, doctor.
He poured the coffee with a steady hand and offered me the plate of biscuits. ‘Kourabedes,’ he explained. ‘My wife makes them.’ I accepted one. It was delicious, much better than the ones you buy in the shops. He was very sociable, as if he was used to people dropping in.
I made a few complimentary comments about the roses, took a sip of coffee, then placed the folder containing the postmortem report on the table. He took the cue.
‘This is what you wanted to see me about?’
‘Yes.’ I flicked my thumb along my fingers to get rid of the powdery film of icing sugar, opened the folder and turned it around for him to read.
‘A relative, Ms Valentine?’
‘My father.’
‘I see.’ He read through the report, refamiliarising himself with it. When he finished he placed his hands on it and leaned forward slightly. ‘This was a number of years ago. I hope I can still be of service.’
I didn’t want to start with the possibility of murder. After all, he was the one who had examined the body and there was nothing in the report itself to indicate that the death wasn’t accidental.
‘I have only recently discovered that my father died. I wouldn’t say there’s a problem, it’s just …’
‘The need to know, is that it?’
I nodded.
‘A common enough reaction. Even those who are present at a death go over and over it in their minds, wondering if there was anything they could have done to prevent it. They are the lucky ones. At least seeing the dead body gives a sense of finality.’