When there’s nowhere else to Run
Page 10
‘I should water the herbs,’ he says, suddenly sitting upright. ‘It’s been a few days.’
‘What? Why don’t you just do it in the morning?’ She neatens his hair and kisses him. ‘You okay?’
‘Fine.’
She kisses him again, this time biting his lower lip playfully until he withdraws.
‘I might as well do it while I still remember,’ he says, trying to make it sound like the most rational thing in the world.
‘Okay,’ she says, sighing. ‘If you have to.’
Richard walks out to the balcony and kneels down, steadying his breathing as he pokes around the dry soil in the vertical herb garden. Another tram rattles past. He tips water into the patch where the coriander and the parsley are growing, watching it soak into the soil, knowing the leaves will be ready in a couple of weeks.
■
Richard lies in bed, listening to Alice’s oblivious breathing, still waiting for a knock at the front door. At 2 am he switches on the clock radio so that he can listen to the news headlines. He braces himself as he hears the orchestral build-up at the start of the ABC bulletin. The female newsreader’s nasal voice sounds so impassive. Why can’t they just talk like normal people? She makes no mention of an accident in Brunswick or a blood-spattered Subaru found near the racetrack, leaving him feeling almost disappointed.
He brushes the cobwebs off Alice’s bicycle and sets off through the local streets. It feels great getting back out on a bike, especially without being weighed down by twenty kilos of mailbags. He’s all over the road at first, but he eventually gets used to the high handlebars. He picks up speed on Lygon Street and flies past the Red Wheelbarrow, Alice’s favourite second-hand bookshop, where they often browse on Saturday mornings before doing their weekly shop at the market.
Realising he’s starving, Richard stops at an all-night kebab caravan out the front of a carwash on Sydney Road. As he waits behind a couple of glazed-eyed teenagers, he starts feeling guilty for having an appetite. One of the teenagers wrestles the other into a headlock and starts cackling. Richard hopes that whoever it was he hit doesn’t have children. But they are, or were, someone’s child. There’s probably already weeping. Somewhere in the city a house is filling with grief and he has filled it. Maybe relatives have already started baking. I am a decent person, he wishes he could tell them.
Once his lamb kebab is ready, he moves to the courtyard outside the Mechanics Institute and watches the traffic go by, savouring the overpowering taste of the garlic sauce. A handful of people are smoking at the tables that spill into the street outside the Retreat, where grainy soul music is coming from. They’re all laughing about something. He hears the deafening splutter of motorbikes approaching and then speeding off towards the city, strangling the night.
A tall man stands up from one of the nearby tables and staggers across the intersection, forcing several cars to wait at the traffic lights, before eventually managing to hail a taxi out the front of the town hall. For a second Richard could swear that it’s Wes, but the posture isn’t quite right. He watches until the taxi disappears from sight. If he’d just not seen Wes in the first place, or not pulled over and given him a lift, or if the bloody person hadn’t emerged out of nowhere without even checking for oncoming traffic, both of them would still be fine. It was peak hour, for Christ’s sake. What kind of idiot just runs out into a busy street like that?
He finishes his kebab and mounts the bicycle, pedalling out into the middle of Sydney Road. It’s invigorating having the tram tracks to himself. The men inside Café Coco are still watching football and smoking hookahs. He catches a whiff of apple shisha. Alice is always saying how the smell reminds her of the streets of Cairo, not that he’s ever been. Not that he’ll ever get to go with her now.
He loves this hectic suburb with its coffee roasting houses, overpriced bars, cafés in old weighbridges, fabric emporiums, bridal salons, Mediterranean wholesalers, halal butchers, rotting pallets and abandoned factories. A year ago two men were gunned down at a nearby panelbeaters in broad daylight. The address was on Richard’s daily run. He remembers how he felt when he realised that; how he secretly loved the feeling of being so close to the action, yet so far away from it.
■
Even though it’s barely 6 am, the butchers at the Queen Victoria Market are already spruiking in the aisles, hands tucked into their armpits. Richard feels safe among the growing crowd in the meat and fish hall, cradling a cardboard crate. It’s much harder shopping without Alice, but he wants to fill the fridge and the pantry with everything that she loves. Asparagus. Fruit and nut bread. Cheeses. Freshly ground coffee.
‘We’ll take two dollars off mid-loin lamb chops, have a look at the quality!’ hollers a butcher with a lopsided nose, trying to fix eyes with Richard.
Richard avoids him by studying the steel rails where the butchers hang animal carcasses and push them around to their stalls first thing in the morning. He feels a great affinity for these men and women who will continue to inhabit the early hours of the morning, which is indisputably the greatest time of day to be alive.
He waits in line at a seafood outlet near the city entrance, staring at the vaulted ceilings, the dim blue lights, the fillets of salmon and the empty eyes of the trout resting on beds of ice. The eyes need to be empty, not cloudy. Richard’s favourite fishmonger has explained it to him countless times. When he reaches the front of the line, the fishmonger grins with his bloodshot eyes.
‘Where’s your beautiful lady?’ asks the fishmonger, his voice already hoarse.
Richard hesitates, feeling a sudden wave of exhaustion. For the life of him, he can’t think of anything witty to say. ‘She’s still sleeping.’
‘Ah, now I see who wears the pants.’ The fishmonger grins again, eyes ablaze.
Richard finally remembers something about him and feels a rush of relief. ‘How do you think the Blues will go this year?’ he asks.
‘Ah, she’s not going to be pretty,’ says the fishmonger, wincing. ‘If you ask me, the players aren’t up to it.’
‘What about the coach?’
‘Never mind him. It doesn’t matter who the coach is. It’s the players. They don’t bleed for the cause. That’s the real problem. These days they get paid all that money and they’ve got none of this,’ says the fishmonger, thumping the chest of his apron.
‘I know what you mean,’ says Richard.
‘Sometimes I wonder what we’re actually paying them for. The members, I mean. Imagine if I tried to do this job with no ticker, do you think I’d make a living?’
‘I guess not.’
‘Exactly. How do you think I feel when I pay my membership fees and my kids’ membership fees and I see no heart? After a while it seems like a kick in the teeth to me, you know.’
Richard nods and points at a fish with bright red gills behind the glass. ‘I’ll have that one, please.’
The fishmonger slides it into a plastic bag, handling the fish with an intimacy that seems both stern and tender. He weighs it on the scales then wraps the plastic bag in butcher’s paper, glancing back up at Richard. ‘I’d play for free, you know, if they asked me to.’
Richard laughs. Almost eleven dollars, he sees the fish is going to cost, but it doesn’t matter because seafood is Alice’s favourite.
‘No, I’m serious,’ says the fishmonger, handing Richard the package and speaking more emphatically. ‘I’d play for free. Honest to God. Just to show them what it’s all about. You can’t buy heart, my friend, not human heart anyway.’
Richard tries to keep laughing as he reaches into his wallet, because he wants to make sure he enjoys the fishmonger’s convictions about football, however fanciful, one last time.
QUEEN ADELAIDE RESTAURANT
Knuckles rapped against the door to my compartment. I was lying on the foldout bed, reading.
‘Good morning in there.’
I recognised the soft inflection of the young stewardess who had been assigne
d to my carriage. I didn’t respond. She turned the handle and pushed the door ajar, revealing the slender fingers on her right hand.
‘Tell me, does anyone sleep a wink on the Indian Pacific?’ I asked.
‘Actually, it’s the opposite for me,’ she said, poking her head around the door and smiling. ‘I’ve done the trip so many times now that I find it harder to sleep on a still bed.’
‘That’s incredible,’ I said, wanting to keep the conversation going.
‘Breakfast’s in ten minutes,’ she said, closing the door.
I took a photograph through the window. The clouds that had obscured the rising sun had finally dispersed. A number of small pools lined the karst terrain beside the tracks, reflecting the blue sky back at itself.
I buttoned up the same cotton shirt that I had worn the day before and zigzagged through the sleeper carriages, arriving at the dining carriage five minutes late. I was the youngest passenger by at least two decades. I sat at the nearest booth to the entrance because all of the other booths were full. The panels above the windows were tinted gold and the words ‘Queen Adelaide Restaurant’ had been condensed into a jumbled insignia on the glass partition behind my booth.
I stared out the window. Since leaving Perth the previous morning, I’d taken a photograph every hour. I figured the pictures would make a good sixty-fifth birthday present for my dad. So far I’d captured flocks of sheep, water towers, grain silos, dying gum trees and barren pastures. The landscape had changed overnight. All that remained was a seemingly endless terrain of red earth and saltbush.
‘Good morning again,’ said the young stewardess, placing a laminated menu on the tablecloth. She was wearing a beige collared shirt, a maroon neckerchief and an apron with the restaurant’s insignia on it. ‘I’m guessing you’d like to start with a coffee,’ she said.
‘The strongest I’m permitted.’
She didn’t laugh as much as I’d hoped.
An elderly man entered the carriage, clutching the upholstery as he shuffled along the aisle. He was wearing a tartan shirt and grey high-waisted trousers. He stopped at the booth where I was seated. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked.
‘Not at all.’
He handed his walking stick to the stewardess and lowered himself to the seat, wincing when his backside touched the cushion. His odour reminded me of musty linen.
‘Peter McKaskill,’ he said, offering his veiny hand across the table. We shook hands.
The stewardess handed back his walking stick and he placed it across his lap.
‘How are you this morning, Pete?’ she asked.
‘A little under the weather, I’m afraid. But thank you for taking the time to ask.’ He let out a chesty cough.
‘Can I get you something to eat?’
‘Not at this stage,’ he said. ‘Mind you, I could do with a glass of that cabernet sauvignon from last night.’
The stewardess neglected to write his order on her notepad.
‘Never been able to stomach breakfast,’ said Pete, fixing his eyes on me drowsily.
I ordered toast with plum jam. The stewardess took my menu and set off towards the kitchen. At the inauguration she had worn a brown, wide-brimmed hat that made her look attainably clumsy, but her gait along the aisle was more assured than any of the passengers.
Pete and I sat silently for several minutes as the cutlery clinked against the table. He had an elongated face with deep-set eyes and heavy bags underneath them. Blood vessels seeped from his sunken cheeks to his nose, merging to form a purple colouration on the ridge. A dark stain permeated his lower lip. There were a number of similar contusions on his forehead.
I looked out the window to avoid his gaze.
‘This is the greenest I’ve seen it,’ said Pete.
It didn’t look very green.
‘Never gets tiring,’ he said. ‘Mind you, we’d be in a bit of trouble if the train broke down. It’d take a couple of days for them to find us.’ He placed an olive-green handkerchief over his mouth and coughed into it.
‘My dad used to tell me stories about when he hitched across the Nullarbor back in the seventies,’ I said. ‘I never really believed how bleak he made it all sound.’
‘It’s bleak alright,’ said Pete, nodding. ‘I drove all around the country in a campervan for the best part of ten years and I can promise you, this is as bleak as it gets.’ He rubbed his stained lower lip. ‘When was the last time you saw a bird out there?’
I looked out the window again. There were four or five mounds of pebbles beside the tracks, but no birds. ‘I honestly can’t remember,’ I said.
‘Exactly.’ He leant back and exhaled, proud of himself in some strange old man’s way. I wasn’t sure if it was something about him or just the unusual occurrence of having breakfast with a stranger, but I felt like I had nothing to lose by talking to him. It wasn’t a feeling I was used to.
The stewardess returned and placed a cup of coffee in front of me and a glass of red wine in front of Pete. He winked at her.
‘Now, if you don’t mind me asking,’ said Pete, pausing to take a drink, ‘what’s a handsome young fellow like you doing on this train?’
‘I haven’t been feeling particularly young lately.’
‘Nonsense,’ he said, missing my attempted joke. ‘You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.’ Looking at the bags under his eyes, it was difficult to refute his point.
‘I was lucky enough to come into a bit of money recently,’ I said. ‘So I guess I’m trying to do something nice for myself and see a bit of the country while I’m at it.’
‘And how did you happen to come into a bit of money?’ he asked. ‘Please stop me if I’m being intrusive.’
‘No, it’s fine.’ I took a sip of coffee. The milk was burnt. ‘I won a writing competition,’ I said.
‘Really? Which one?’
I told him which one.
‘That’s the one they print in the paper every year, isn’t it?’
‘It usually gets a run,’ I said. ‘To be honest, I couldn’t quite bring myself to read it in print.’
‘I think I might have actually read your story. Was it the one about the miner in Kalgoorlie with the crook back?’
‘Yeah, that’s the one,’ I said, smiling.
Pete took another long drink. ‘This is exciting stuff,’ he said. ‘A real-life writer sitting at my breakfast table.’
I didn’t feel like a real-life writer. A photographer from the newspaper had visited me at work shortly before the announcement and lined me up against a steel roller door. He asked me to smile a brooding writer’s smile. It occurred to me that I’d have to be an actor, not a writer, to be able to pull that off.
‘I thought it was a very skilful piece,’ said Pete. ‘And I’m not just saying that. You’ve definitely got a way with words. I remember being very impressed with the first line, even though I’ve completely forgotten what it was now.’
‘Bluey Randall reckoned he’d seen enough darkness for one lifetime,’ I said.
‘That’s it. Fantastic opening sentence, tells us everything we need to know about the man.’ He coughed into his handkerchief again. ‘Looking at you now though, I’m guessing you haven’t spent too much time yourself down in the mines. So I’m wondering how it is you got to know all those details.’
‘It’s mostly just research.’
‘Sure,’ he said.
I’d spent more time researching degenerative disc diseases in the past six months than I had in pubs, taking the piss out of friends.
‘It’s just, there were a few small details in there, and maybe I’m reading too much into everything, but there were some things that just felt a bit, I don’t know, they just jarred with me. Mind you, it might just have been the mood I was in when I was reading the story.’
‘Anything in particular?’
‘For starters, there’s that part where the main character . . . what’s his name again?’
‘Bluey,’ I said.
Pete cleared his throat. Saliva was gathering at the corners of his mouth. ‘What I’m saying is, it all just feels like something that would happen in a story, but maybe not quite in real life. Maybe in real life he doesn’t get to have the surgery, but maybe he doesn’t end up throwing all his money away at the casino, either. No one throws it all away without a reason.’
He glanced out the window and then looked me in the eye. ‘At least, that’s the way it seems to me. But I might well be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time.’
He was tapping into one of my greatest fears, namely that the majority of what I wrote would only ever seem like a refined version of the truth. Somehow I wanted it to be more than that.
‘Also,’ said Pete, not finished yet, ‘I understand that you want to show it’s all a cycle with this man. He works hard. He plays hard. All that flirty business with the young women is fine, maybe a bit beside the point, but still fine. I suppose what I’m asking is, why should we really care about him, as readers? Why does it mean anything to us when he throws it all away, just for the sake of it?’
‘I’m not asking anyone to care about him,’ I said, my voice wavering. ‘I don’t think it’s important for a reader to care about a character one way or another.’
‘Maybe “care” isn’t the right word then. I know characters don’t necessarily have to be likeable. Most of us aren’t. But surely they’ve got to make us feel something, or reflect on something, otherwise they’re just words and descriptions on a page, taking up our time, and I don’t have that much of it left.’
I didn’t know how he could be so unaware of the froth that had built up at the corners of his mouth.
‘I can see I’ve upset you,’ said Pete. ‘Please know it wasn’t my intention. Honestly, it’s all there in your story. The judges definitely made the right choice. You’ve set it up for us and it’s obvious you know what you’re doing. What I’m talking about, or trying to, is the killer punch. If I’m being hypercritical, it just never quite lands that killer punch. That’s all.’