The Crying Place Page 2

  I needed to ring someone. Tell them what had happened. Someone who didn’t know yet, for who it wasn’t yet true. But who? Ella had known him pretty well. In the eighteen months we were together, she met Jed several times, said we were like a couple of old war heroes when we got together, always mythologising the past. But over the last year or so, since she’d moved up to Cairns with that restaurant guy, Ella’s emails had gone from sparse to seasonal to non-existent. People from back home – most of them were ancient history or elsewhere, their lives, their loves, no longer aligned with mine.

  No, there was only one person I’d call at a moment like this, and that was no longer possible.

  I picked up my mobile and scrolled through my messages to the last one I’d had from Jed.

  Hey Saul. Where are you?

  It had felt good to hear from him. Every time I saw his name in my inbox or on a text there was that small thrill, that tension, which comes from reconnecting with someone whose presence has been so constant that you risk being brought face to face with old versions of yourself – your success and failure in fulfilling them. That sudden reminder that there are those who help to give your life momentum.

  Sydney. Why?

  No reply.

  I’d checked my phone on and off that day, but figured he’d answer when he knew what he wanted to say. Sometimes it would take him weeks, even months, to get back to me, though his messages would read as if there’d only been a minute’s pause.

  I verified the date again, just to make sure. Both texts, his and mine, had been sent around lunchtime only three days before. Thumb hovering over the keypad, I fought the urge to send him one last message. A futile cry into the ether.

  ‘Shit, Jed. What the fuck happened?’

  Only the bats answered, their febrile screeching close as I paced the room.

  My phone rang again, nagged at the blinds, at the walls. But I let the call go through, because I already knew: that it was not words that were required now, but movement.

  I killed the TV. Tossed the remote into the corner of the couch among the sprawled pages of the newspaper I’d bought on the way home from work, an evening that had begun like so many others. Headed for the door, scratches at its base from a dog once forced to live where it didn’t belong. Outside, at the bottom of the street, the shore stretched. There’d be joggers and kids on bikes, a semblance of normality. I could follow the bay, keep going till the night started to make some kind of sense. But to where? If there was one thing we’d learnt from all those years on the road, it was that movement without a guiding principle was like food stripped of its taste.

  This was not Jed’s city, never had been, not even for a brief time.

  No answers were to be found here.

  There was only one place I needed to go.

  The simplicity of it struck me as I recalled what my mother had said: that place … by the beach. Struck me with such force that I laughed out loud, though the tone was high-pitched, reckless, as if seeking out the company of the bats.

  From under the bed I dragged my old backpack, a rip in the side from when it’d got snagged on the roof railing of a bus in Pakistan as we’d slalomed the hairpin bends of the Karakoram Highway. I stared at the ragged tear. Felt my knees start to give.

  Gotta keep moving, mate. Keep moving.

  I shoved things into the pack. A spare t-shirt. Jumper. Jocks. My old toiletries bag, always on the bathroom shelf, never quite ready to commit to a drawer.

  By the front door, I plunged my hand into the coin bowl and felt for my keys. Rummaged a little longer than I needed to, possessing the clink of metal against glass, two substances so capable of injury. Then, pack slung over one shoulder, I walked out.

  The curry I left to the fly.

  2

  We were seventeen. Jed stank of cider, of apples left to rot at the base of a tree, same as he did when he was coming down with something – you realise you know someone when you recognise the advent of illness on their skin. His face was lit by the fire, his usually rounded features rendered geometric, tilting blocks of black and white.

  The party was on the beach out the back of a friend’s place. At least, we called it a beach, though it was really just a strip of pebbles leading down to the shoreline; to the Derwent River, its waters a briny mix of mountain flow and southern ocean currents, salty on the tongue, the name Celtic, meaning ‘valley thick with oaks’, its banks once heaving with casuarinas. Jed and I had been born into the same housing commission suburb on its Eastern Shore, the year after the bridge got mowed down by a bulk carrier heading to the zinc works, Hobart cut in half. By the time we’d hit high school, parts of the suburb were going through a gentrification of sorts as people began to buy up the government-owned houses and put in camellias and concrete statues, though it still had its whipped vibe, as if the ghosts of the ex-convicts who’d first settled there were still hanging around.

  The party was being held in one of the better suburbs further up the river, our friend newly moved there, his parents believing that geography could make a difference. They’d gone away for the weekend, so our friend decided to hold a house-warming. The lower sections of a neighbouring fence had already been sacrificed to the flames – the first act of rebellion for the night – though I’d felt dubious about it as I’d watched two guys from one of the more affluent schools rip out the white palings. Felt it wasn’t their prerogative.

  Jed was pissed off about something.

  He kept knocking the lip of the green bottle against his teeth, Mercury Dry, his other hand in the pocket of his jeans, picking a fight with a fistful of change. A girl was watching him, a girl I’d never seen before, her dark hair lured by the wind rising off the river, her face morphing in accordance with the movement of the flames: cute, grotesque, exquisite. But Jed didn’t notice her. He never noticed when someone was falling in love with him, only when they began to pull away.

  He walked down to the edge of the river and I followed him, a small bottle of whisky in my back pocket. My dad, in a rare fit of complicity, had stopped at the bottle shop to buy it for me – though with my own earnings, of course. I took a swig, felt the neat burn followed by my stomach recoiling from it, my favourite part, and held it out to Jed. He threw his head back as he drank, his blond hair crawling halfway down his jacket. Left the taste of decaying apples on the bottle’s lip, the moon a fat white globe, making fools of the city lights on the other side of the water.

  ‘What’s eating you?’ I asked.

  ‘Them.’

  He pointed to the fence defilers, their jeans the kind you bought pre-ripped.

  ‘Wankers,’ I said and took another swig.

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Ingrates.’

  ‘They don’t get it. None of them do.’

  He finished the cider and threw the bottle into the water, where it bobbed on the crest of a small wave briefly, before disappearing beneath the surface. As I watched the salty waters close over it, I wondered what message we could’ve sent, where it might’ve ended up.

  Jed took the bottle I offered but, rather than take a sip, he held it up to the light, as if something of its potency was needed to give his words the magnitude he required. Maybe it was the full moon, maybe it was the booze, but it was clear it was turning into that kind of night.

  ‘They think it’s about getting away with shit rather than owning it,’ he said, projecting a glob of spit to meet the waterline. He handed the bottle back without drinking any.

  ‘It’s because they’ve always got away with everything. That’s how it works.’

  ‘Fuck that,’ he said, but there was something about the way he put his hands on his hips and stared up at the sky that told me this wasn’t some wrong-side-of-the-tracks lament. Something about the way he shuddered as he straightened up that made me scull the remainder of the whisky without stopping for breath. My gut protested and I leant forwards, hands on my knees, sure I would lose it all on my boots, fire in my throat, but then
it began its coursing, my veins alive with it.

  ‘Fuck them,’ I said and tossed my bottle in the same direction he’d thrown his. ‘Fuck them all!’

  I scooped up a handful of pebbles and threw them one after another at the bottle with some vain notion of smashing it before it sank, the booze playing havoc with my usually careful aim. Before I could reach down for more ammunition, Jed was there beside me doing the same thing, the two of us pelting the river with such rapidity that when we heard the first clink we didn’t know whose stone had connected with the glass.

  Though it didn’t matter of course. That’s not what it was about.

  We stared at the bottle, half expecting in our lubricated state the clink to be followed by a proclamation – something about buoyancy maybe, or how emptiness speaks, a small gesture from the world to verify our adolescent Zen. Stared at that bottle as it rose high on a crest, brash in the moonlight, winking. But then it too disappeared beneath the dark surface.

  ‘One day I will,’ he said, turning towards me, his eyes a little limp from the cider but vigilant as always.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Understand the river.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I didn’t say anything more, the whisky having rendered me monosyllabic.

  But not for an instant did I doubt him, that he would dedicate himself to this cause articulated for the first time beneath the excess of that moon, the receding tide stealing the stones from right under our feet. Though as he turned to face the water again there was one thing I couldn’t be sure of: whether I’d still be standing beside him the day he worked out what he meant by that, no matter how inseparable we felt in that instant.

  3

  Outside, insects colonised the streetlamp, their bodies, their wings, in restless motion, maybe unsure if the bats were strictly vegetarian. The road led down, this too a suburb that ended in salt water – a cove though, not a river.

  In the alleyway, the lock on my garage put up its usual resistance, the rumble of the roller door like a meteorological event in metal. Hitching my pack higher on my shoulder, I tried to shake off the feeling of foreboding.

  Squatting in the shadows was my old Subaru, steel blue, flat-nosed, a spider’s web fusing the side mirror to the passenger door. A 1984 1800 Sportswagon – the only car I’ve ever owned – abandoned in laneways and backyards whenever I travelled overseas, thwarted by the fact that it had been sold into an island nation.

  I threw my pack in the back and slid in the key.

  Smiled at the way she kicked over first time, some things beyond question, then remembered why I was here.

  There was the usual onslaught of cars as I exited the alleyway, the earthy aftertaste of curry coating my tongue as I drove past the Thai restaurant on Glebe Point Road where I’d eaten the night I’d moved in, its neon sign like a marker of time rather than location. And now it would be another marker. All of this would. It began to rain, my crappy wipers forming arched streaks across the windscreen, the profusion of brake lights before me like fanned embers. 7:45 read the clock on the dashboard.

  I headed out of town – everything a little too neat: the white lines, the cats’ eyes, the shiny steel of the safety barriers that are intended to protect but that can flay a motorcyclist like a cheese grater – and before long the highway was stretching out before me, the Hume, named after one more dead explorer. If I pushed on, I could make it to Melbourne by four. Watch the sun rise over Port Phillip Bay. Go for breakfast maybe at that place on Fitzroy Street, the one with the big couches. Watch the peak-hour traffic with a sense of reprieve. Then, once I’d got my shit together, I could do what needed to be done.

  A white Patrol loomed large in my rear vision.

  Barrelling headlong, it felt like an intruder from another world, its bull bar festooned with lights, momentarily blinding me. It roared past, going at least thirty over the limit – no one visible through the dark glass – and I had a sudden vision of it flipped on its roof, wheels spinning. Pictured myself standing beside the upturned vehicle sniffing for petrol, weighing up the details like a man after an explosion might pick through his remains, counting elbows, digits, before the numbness wore off and what he’d truly lost became evident.

  And for a moment it penetrated – the raw truth of what had happened – like a shudder up the spine of the night.

  But then it was gone, hurtling into the dark.

  4

  The Southern Cross sat watchful in the corner of my windscreen, a constant reminder I was heading in the right direction. Me old mate, my father used to call it, as if each one of his memories was somehow connected to it – without it, the world only confused geography. He never talked like that except when we went camping, some ocker version of himself leaching out of the soil. Sometimes he’d slip in a bit of Cockney rhyming slang to go with it, the old trouble and strife, as if being in the wild demanded a return to origins, even if the source was muddied by years and distance.

  His voice was still in my head as I turned off at Goulburn, the gauge cowering close to empty for a while. And he was the one to answer when I called my mother back from the only station I could find open.

  ‘Saul,’ he murmured, and for a moment I thought he might break with form, cut into the emotion of the thing. But all he said was, ‘I’ll get your mum.’

  I huddled as I waited for her to come, L-plates lined up on the overly lit wall behind the woman at the night counter, their black letters like the mark of an unnamed sin. My mother’s nails clicked on the receiver as she picked it up.

  ‘Saul. Thank God. When you didn’t answer, I thought maybe …’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s just … I need to understand what happened to Jed.’

  ‘I know. It doesn’t make sense. Even as a boy, he was always so cheerful. He could be a handful sometimes, a bit hyper, but there was nothing dark about him. Nothing like this.’

  Nothing like this, I repeated to myself. Though in the back there, in some lawless part of my brain, was a doubt: how much do we ever know anybody?

  ‘Did Elaine tell you anything more?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yes.’

  As I picked at a crack in the dashboard, she told me everything she knew. The place. The witnesses. The scale of the tragedy. Threw in a few of her own theories, the inevitable platitudes, no matter how bad things get, there’s always a solution. Anything to ward off her most cold-blooded fears. When she was done, I told her I was fine, hoping to assuage a little of the panic that filled her voice.

  ‘That’s good,’ she said, sounding halfway convinced.

  ‘I’ve gotta go,’ I said.

  ‘Of course.’

  She paused a moment before she whispered goodnight, the same way she used to when I was a kid, her mouth brushing my ear as if sleep was a secret, or a crime about which we must never speak.

  My mobile fell silent.

  The engine ticked.

  I got out of the car, fuelled up, paid the cashier.

  I couldn’t see any toilets around, so I drove to the far end of the car park behind the station. Pulled over. Selected a large stringybark. Monitored the rustle of piss landing on leaves. The night was cold, the wind different here than it was in Sydney. Drier. It must have passed over desert not long before, though along the way it had collected the camphorous smell of eucalyptus, its faculty for nostalgia … a midsummer track, the whiff of bushfire and two-stroke, wallabies bolting between the trunks, the thud thud of their tails against the sandy dirt.

  Our wrists had ached like buggery as we’d revved our way through that forest out near Friendly Beaches. Neither of us old enough to have a licence, we always stuck to the bush tracks. The exact position of the fire was unclear. Smoke clinging to the trees in ghostly swathes, the only real indication was the direction in which the other animals fled, a huge Eastern Grey kangaroo almost knocking me off my bike. The smoke had got so thick it was like driving through cream. But
we’d laced our way through it, Jed whooping, as intoxicated as I was by the thought that it was just us and our wits and a couple of shitty dirt bikes we’d saved up for all year against the lethal force of a bushfire.

  Too alive to be anything but invincible.

  5

  I woke with a feeling like a hangover, two goats arguing in the distance like pre-linguistic children. Down by the creek I’d parked beside the night before, mist levitated, impaled by the rising sun; debris, snagged in the lowest branches of the trees, evidence of recent floods. I rolled up the sleeping bag that lived in my car and dragged on my boots. Texted my boss, Andy, to tell him I wouldn’t be in for a few days. Family issues.

  Back on the highway, I reached the border a little before ten, the Murray halfway on its journey to the coast, a drifting khaki expanse. As I crossed it a pelican flew overhead, skimmed the glassy surface of the river, its reflection shattered into bits.

  The sign on the other side promised You’ll love every piece of Victoria, but with each feature, each landmark, I felt a growing sense of dread. The quarantine bins. Glenrowan, where Ned Kelly made his last stand, the hills layers of steel-blue like residue on a bullet. Beside a graveyard, what looked like a scar tree. Then the gradual slide into the city began, houses multiplying in freshly carved suburbs, skyscrapers heaving in the distance.

  Melbourne, the city of return.

  Not the city of my birth, but always the portal into my old life after a long journey, a crushing sense of déjà vu overtaking me as I’d drive in from Tullamarine airport, of the fatigue inherent to being the one who always came back.

  And now, here I was again, though under very different circumstances.

  I stuck with the freeway till it spat me out in South Melbourne. The noon traffic surprisingly sparse, it wasn’t long till I was hanging a right into Fitzroy Street, the footpath cluttered with occupied café tables, hipster suits, the guys in fluoro work gear hitting the takeaways, sunglasses perched on the peaks of their caps.