by Marele Day
‘Yes, look it up in the phone book, ring Jack up, he’ll vouch for me.’
Someone did use the phone. Because the next thing I knew I was being escorted to the door where a cab waited.
‘I’ll be back,’ I announced ominously.
Another ride through the bright lights of Sydney. Then suddenly we were outside the pub. I gave the driver some spare change. He said it wasn’t enough. I handed him my wallet. ‘Help yourself.’ I remember seeing him take a ten dollar blue plastic note out and handing the wallet back.
‘Evening, Jack,’ I said, foolishly passing through the public bar where all the regulars could see me.
It was Marty who helped me up the stairs, damn it. He was always such a smartarse, I’d never hear the end of this. ‘Thank you, that’ll be all,’ I dismissed him when we got to my door. I fumbled around for half an hour trying to get the key in the lock. I must have succeeded because when I woke up it was daylight and I was in my own bed. Thankfully alone.
TWENTY-TWO
Boy, did I feel seedy the next day. It was mid-morning when I woke up. I’d slept for a good twelve hours. Didn’t make me feel any better though. I felt like a member of an extinct species suddenly waking up and finding out it was the twenty-first century. I thought at first I was still under the railway bridge with Sebastian because I could smell the same smell. Then I realised it was me. I was sweating beer. Casual sex with an old mate one night, getting drunk and disorderly with a dero the next, what was happening to me? It was that panel van. I had to get rid of that panel van, give it back to Danny before it led me further astray. If only I could remember where I’d parked it.
I stumbled out of bed and into the shower. Washed my hair, turned the hot tap off and stood under the cascade of cold water wondering yes, why do female private eyes have so many showers? It took a few seconds to penetrate my hair but soon I felt the cold beating into my brain, hopefully clearing out the cobwebs, though why a spider would want to spin a web in my brain was beyond me.
I pressed Play on the answering machine. The first message was from Mina wondering where I was. Oh God. Dinner. Last night. I was supposed to go over there for dinner last night.
‘Mum? It’s Claudia.’ She was so relieved to hear my voice, she thought something must have happened to me. Well, obviously Janet hadn’t got to her yet. ‘I’m sorry. I got caught up in something and I couldn’t phone.’ She asked me if I was all right. ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ I lied, ‘it was just something routine.’ She said Brian wanted to talk to me, perhaps I could give him a ring at work. ‘Yes, OK. Bye now.’
I dressed then went up to a cafe in Rozelle for some bacon and eggs. I could have had them in Balmain but I didn’t want bits of tomato and alfalfa sprouts decorating my breakfast. I wanted grease, and plenty of it.
The cafe reflected my mood—seedy. It looked as if nothing had been moved since the 1950s. There were Coke ads on the wall that must be collector’s items by now, chipped laminex tables, and a vase of plastic flowers on the counter. There was only one other person in there, a grey man who may have been a homeless person himself. Maybe he wasn’t grey, maybe he just needed dusting. He ate very slowly, intent on his task.
My bacon and eggs came, with a pot of tea and a chipped mug. This was living. Being a coffee addict I rarely drink tea but tea seems to go with the bacon and eggs. There was a bottle of tomato sauce on the table but I hadn’t sunk so low I’d put tomato sauce on fried egg. Blood and guts. I sat the egg on the buttered toast and stuck a knife into the yolk, letting it run into a yellow pool. Fortunately the white was firm. A snotty white that morning and I would have lost it. I cut off a piece of bacon and toast with egg yolk and began my breakfast.
It hit my belly with a thud and stayed there. I had the feeling that it had actually pasted itself onto the wall of my stomach. Food again. I’d recently had a dollop of sex and here I was still eating—dollops of grease. So much for the food and sex theory. It wasn’t food as such but the type of food. What was I doing eating greasy bacon and eggs in this seedy cafe when I could have been having foccacie and good coffee in any number of trendy cafes? Because I was trangressing. It had started right back in Melbourne with the cake and cream.
I looked over at the man in the corner. He could have been a wax dummy except that, like the men at the hostel, his mouth was moving, slowly, methodically chewing his food. And somehow with food, with this breakfast at least, I had slipped below the veneer of civilised society into another world. The sub-world, the underground. Life on the bottom rung. Perhaps I would never find my father but last night I’d experienced the kind of life he’d led. That’s why I’d sat under the railway bridge with Sebastian and got ripped, that’s why I was sitting here this morning. But I didn’t want to live my father’s life, I wanted to rescue him from it. I left the second piece of toast, paid my money and went on my way. I had work to do.
From Rozelle I went into the city. On the footpath by St James station was the outline of an idyllic tropical rainforest, refreshingly cool in the blazing summer heat, even if it was only chalk. Raf’s new work had progressed but the artist was nowhere to be seen. It was early afternoon. I waited but he didn’t show up.
I drove up to the house in Darlinghurst and knocked on the door. There was no answer. The music I’d heard on my previous two visits was absent. It looked like everyone was out. Which, in a way, was probably just as well. I wanted to speak to Raf on his own, and I didn’t want him forewarned, didn’t want the household letting him know someone was asking after him.
He wasn’t at his painting, he wasn’t at Darlinghurst. But I hadn’t run out of possibilities yet.
I drove to Glebe, heading for the railway tunnel that, according to Kerry, the Agharti group used as a meeting place. The former goods train line in Glebe runs right the way through to Darling Harbour. Part of the line is visible from White Bay but what with everything else happening around that area at the moment, you can pass by it every day without even noticing. What motorists pay attention to now is the work in progress on the new suspension bridge over Glebe Island Bridge. Or the way the former wheat silos on the other side of the road have been transformed into Olympic art—classic columns with sportspeople in various poses. Sometimes you’d see the artists at work, miniscule figures on frames. It was like watching Michelangelo’s minions working on the Sistine Chapel. As I drove round White Bay and into Glebe I wondered whether any of that was Raf’s artwork. Public art. From what Kerry had told me it was the kind of thing he’d do.
I parked the van in Glebe Point Road. There was a gradated grassy slope between Glebe Point Road and Bridge Road. I walked down it, past neat little terraces with shady gardens. A high wind whistled in the row of poplar trees. Wafting up on the wind was the hum of the Bridge Road traffic and the sounds of the city. There was a park bench, rarely used, a long strip of playground with swings and slippery dip. Through the trees I could see the trawlers moored at the Fish Market across Blackwattle Bay. Behind that the Harbour Bridge and tall city buildings. Blinding glittering light bounced off them from the glaring sun. The last thing I saw before going down the final set of steps was the railway bridge crossing Bridge Road. It curved in towards the city—from this angle it appeared to run right into the Centrepoint Tower.
The wire fence had a gap in it at one convenient point. I thought of the wire fence alongside the stormwater canal in Rushcutters Bay. Same dilapidated fence, same overgrown weeds. I walked through the weeds, up the grade, swung over the low metal wall beside the rusting tracks and landed on the chunky gravel. If I turned right I could walk along the track, aboveground, to Darling Harbour. But I turned left and crunched along to the wide gaping hole of the tunnel.
Coming into it from bright sunlight the tunnel seemed to swallow you up. It was not a feeling I enjoyed. I don’t mind heights but I don’t like being underground. Even though the tunnel was two tracks wide, I felt claustrophobic. I could think of a lot more fun ways of getting thrills than this.
>
I had only just entered the tunnel when a huge flapping thing suddenly appeared out of the darkness. I automatically ducked but still felt the breeze as it screeched past. A bat. Flapping out into the sunlight like the proverbial bat out of hell. I calmed down. The noise of my feet crunching on the gravel must have scared it. It wasn’t heading for me on purpose, I reassured myself; I’d disturbed it, that’s all. It was getting out of there, which is what my instinct told me to do as well.
Instead, I walked further on into the darkness. There was the odd flattened drink can on the ground, old electric wires and cables. It all looked as if it had been here a long time. I didn’t really expect to come across a meeting of Raf and his Agharti worshippers but the tunnel would perhaps reveal something. Occasionally there were alcoves where railway workers presumably took refuge from a passing train. I walked on, crunching gravel underfoot. The whole floor of the tunnel was covered in these chunks of gravel which in places completely obscured the railway sleepers. What did they do when they had their meetings, bring cushions?
I trod on something softer. I shone my torch down to find I was standing on the remnants of a hay bale. As if this was a barn rather than a railway tunnel in the middle of the city. Though the tunnel seemed to be a country of its own I remembered that in the outside world, Harold Park Raceway was not too far away. Horses, hay. Would people be carrying hay bales across the park? Someone must have.
I moved on. I could hear the faint trickle of water, it felt cooler. Coming from the left side of the tunnel. I shone the torch again. Between the tracks and the wall of the tunnel ran a narrow drain. Water also ran down the walls in places leaving mineral deposits that looked like dirty stalactites. Surely I must be midway now. I looked back. The circle of light, the place where I’d entered the tunnel, looked far away. The light at the other end was faint and wan. Maybe if you were fifteen, maybe with a whole bunch of people, this would be fun.
I tried not to think about the fact that there were tonnes of earth pressing down on me. I don’t even like going into a police station. What was I doing in this claustrophobic place? I remembered childhood fears of the dark. Now I was in the pitch black it struck me that there was a good sound reason for them. In the childhood of the species we made our homes in caves. But you never knew what other species also called that cave home, what creature might be lurking in the darkness at the back of the cave, whether there was any back to the cave at all. One step too many and you might plummet blindly into a gaping black void. I wondered whether a scream would echo deafeningly off the walls or just get swallowed up in the darkness.
This was ridiculous, I was scaring myself. The hangover probably wasn’t helping. But the light at the other end of the tunnel did seem to be getting fainter and fainter. This couldn’t be, my mind was playing tricks on me. I went on, staying on the tracks, keeping the metal beneath my feet. If I stayed on the tracks I’d be all right. Kerry had said they would explore any kind of tunnel—railways were an obvious one, but there were Telecom tunnels, the stormwater canals, a whole host of tunnels and pipes conveying services to the city. Even the optic fibre super highways were carried underground.
There was a dull, faraway sound. A train approaching? How did I know for sure this was a disused tunnel? Maybe they’d started using it again. I felt as if I’d been in here for years. I strained my ears but the noise faded away.
I kept the torch on all the time now because the light that was faintly visible at the other end of the tunnel had disappeared. I came across another alcove, this one deeper than the rest. There were recesses of darkness that the torchlight didn’t reach. I stepped off the track and came up close to the wall. The alcove had a small door in it, swung open to reveal a power box. The door looked as if it had been in that position for a long time. The rusty remains of a seat were in front of it. Everything was utterly still and inert.
I swung the torch to the wall opposite. There was a similar alcove on that side, yet somehow it looked different. I crossed over the tracks. The first thing I saw were the butts of candles on the ground near the wall, candles that had burnt away almost to nothing. I shone the torch directly into the alcove. Onto a faded chalk drawing.
I don’t know why it took me by surprise—after all, I was half-expecting to see some evidence of the Agharti gang. It was a drawing of the same peculiar keyhole entrance as the photo I’d seen in the book. As the tattoo I’d seen on Kerry. Although the darkness had preserved the bright colours of the chalk, the seepage of water had started a process of disintegration. I’d obviously located the meeting place but discovering it didn’t help me any. What was I to do? Leave my name and phone number on the wall for Raf? The candle butts were dusty. The place didn’t look as if it had been used recently anyway.
I heard a loud rumbling noise coming straight for me. Automatically I pressed myself against the wall, lost balance and fell backwards into the alcove. It sounded like a plane. A plane coming right through this tunnel. It boomed louder and louder then faded away. I stood up, panting. Relax, I told myself. If you can hear a plane that loud it means you’re almost out. I shone the torch along the tracks and followed the beam. In the distance I could see shapes looming in the darkness, blotches of trees and shrubs. I could hear cicadas, distant traffic, signs of the outside world.
The quality of the air changed and it wasn’t long before I walked out of the tunnel. But everything was different. There was the faint smell of smoke and a darkness in the air. I could make out the track extending over a series of support arches through Jubilee Park across the storm-water canal and on forever. I clambered down the siding into the park and kept going, across the walkway over the canal. An orange armchair sat half-submerged in the water of the canal. The park was expansive, I could see for miles. I walked to the road and hailed a cab back to where the van was parked. It was taking the long way round, but once through the tunnel was enough. I had absolutely no inclination to repeat the experience.
TWENTY-THREE
The dead-end underground, the hangover, brought me forcibly back to my other obsession. Matthew Talbot wasn’t the only hostel in Sydney, there were others. Some of them in Surry Hills. Another snippet of the conversation with Sebastian came online. Surry Hills was where my father had shifted to. And he may have specifically mentioned Swanton Lodge because the place seemed vaguely familiar. It wasn’t a lot different from Matthew Talbot except that it didn’t cater exclusively to men; they took women as well. I walked in, hopefully looking better than I felt.
I breezed up to the desk, trying a slightly different approach this time. ‘I’m here to see Guy Valentine,’ I said, as if it was a business appointment.
The woman looked at me as if the name rang a bell. ‘Ye-s,’ she said, ‘just wait a minute, will you?’
I was taken aback, not anticipating such a quick result. I didn’t expect him to actually be here right at this moment. I thought about leaving a message and then walking out. Did I really want to have the reunion with my father in the reception area of a hostel?
The other woman at the desk was smiling at me, ready to start up a conversation. I smiled back, not enthusiastically enough for her to start talking to me though. It didn’t seem as busy here as it had at Matthew Talbot, perhaps because it was a quiet mid-afternoon period. There was the sound of metal buckets and mops in the corridor, and the same strong smell of bleach I’d noticed at Matthew Talbot.
‘Excuse us.’ The bucket and mop had made it into the reception area, manoeuvred by a gentleman with black eyebrows and grey hair swept straight back from his face. I moved aside to let him get on with the job. He was whistling, enjoying his work.
The woman came back carrying a ledger. Alone. I expected to see a short stocky man with her but there was no-one. ‘Did you say Gay Valentine?’
‘No, it was Guy Valentine.’
‘Hmm, that’s odd,’ she said. ‘We had a Valentine in here last night but in the women’s dorm.’ She placed the ledger on the counter. ‘Only
here for half an hour though.’
Oh God, no wonder the place looked familiar. When I’d said last night ‘I’ll be back’ I hadn’t realised how prophetic those words would be. Well at least no-one would recognise me, unless the night shift doubled up and did the days as well. Upside down I could read the comment: ‘Refused to stay.’ Yes, I remembered that bit. The cleaner had now started mopping up around the desk. I moved out of his way.
‘This isn’t Guy, it’s a longer name than that. It looks like …’ she squinted her eyes, peering. ‘What does that say, Robyn?’ she asked the other woman at the desk. ‘Is it Caroline?’
The other woman peered at it as well. ‘Looks to me like Claudine,’ said Robyn.
‘Actually, it’s Claudia,’ I said, putting them out of their misery. ‘It’s me.’
‘You were in Proclaim last night?’ They weren’t surprised-they got all sorts in here—just baffled.
‘That’s right. Let me clear things up for you. I was in Proclaim briefly last night, that’s over and done with. This afternoon I’m here on an entirely unrelated matter—looking for my father whose name is Guy Valentine.’
But they were still baffled. The mix-up with the names, it was all too confusing for them.
‘Guy,’ I repeated to their blank faces. ‘Shakespeare,’ I said as a last resort. ‘He used to hang out at Rushcutters Bay, had a mate called Sebastian.’
They stood there slowly shaking their heads. So many names, so few beds.
‘That’s the trouble with you professionals,’ the cleaner addressed the women. ‘They keep swapping youse round so you don’t stay in one place long enough to get to know anyone. He used to do this job, Shakespeare. Gawd, he was so slow.’ He chuckled to himself as if it was a private joke.
I forgot the women and turned my attention to the cleaner. ‘He worked here?’
‘Sure did. Volunteer. Same as me. You’ve got to put something back into it.’ He went on with the job, whistling and sluicing water around and throwing that mop to the ground as if it were a bull.