The Crying Place Read online

  I managed to find a park out the front of the kebab place. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see the beach, but I could smell the bay, a blend of smog and ozone that hinted at the grey expanse that lay beyond the pubs and restaurants and apartments with their wannabe-seaside-resort stucco. Over by the tram stop, a huge woman in a floral skirt checked the butts around the rim of a rubbish bin. Pocketed a few, not a flicker of shame.

  I got out, the sun warm for April. Shook the road from my legs. Next to my car, a man and a woman were sitting on a bench, the guy huddled into his hoodie, the woman in a black beanie, both of them Aboriginal. Her tongue escaped her mouth when she spoke as if she wished to retract her words, lick them back. A police van went past and she waved at it, her fingers curling one after the other into a fist. The cops nodded back.

  How many times had I walked this stretch? The pharmacy with its bargain bins. The wall plastered with flyers advertising gigs – music at the Palais, comedy at the Espy. A gull cocked its head at me like I was the prodigal son returned.

  At the intersection, I watched while others crossed at the green light. A guy in a grey suit frowned at me as if I’d squandered something, a Neighbours tour bus heading up the Esplanade.

  And then there it was. A porthole, curving balustrades, an upstairs window square and jutting out like the ones on the old Ottoman houses you see in central Turkey – a building of parts, as if it couldn’t quite make up its mind what it was about. Jed had ended up there more than once when he was in Melbourne. The first time was after he’d got back from South America, where he’d been travelling with a Colombian woman named Luciana. She was as volatile as a grenade with a loose pin, and somewhere south of La Paz the dread of wild-eyed nights had superseded any hankering for the exotic or blistering make-up sex. He’d landed in Melbourne not far shy of penniless. Had said that the boarding house suited his wanderlust. Words like ‘lease’ and ‘mortgage’ were Jed’s idea of Chinese water torture. The slow drip of the banal.

  This time I crossed with the lights.

  In the middle of the footpath that led to the porch was an empty VB carton, a hole punched in its side. I stepped over it. Walked right up to the front door. Stood before it with a degree of expectancy matched only by the knowledge that I was too late.

  6

  I knocked but nobody answered. A magpie pecked at the VB carton and I remembered a woman I’d met there once who claimed that she could speak to birds. She’d said that mostly they talked about the weather, but sometimes they told her what it was like to be airborne and to feel the wind as something solid. I think that’s what Jed liked about the place. They were all mould-breakers.

  ‘You looking for somebody?’ asked a voice with a rasp.

  A tall guy was standing behind me, a plastic bag swinging by his side. A bunch of keys were woven between his sinewy fingers, Schrodinger’s cat is alive written across his t-shirt, a kitten lying on its back, crosses for eyes.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A friend.’

  He threw me a suspicious look, ginger stubble accentuating the boniness of his jaw. I stepped aside as he searched for the right key, which took him a while to find. He half looked over his shoulder as he unlocked the door, releasing the mustiness of a building victim of alternating cycles of gentrification and decline.

  A cat squeezed its head through the gap. Made to dart. I caught it on the way out.

  ‘Good job,’ said the guy. ‘Maco would be lost without it.’

  ‘Maco?’

  ‘Old fella from Macedonia. Lives for that mangy thing.’

  The cat squirmed. Its ribs were distinct beneath its striped fur but robust, a firm cage for its thumping heart. The guy pocketed his keys.

  ‘A friend, you say?’

  ‘Jed,’ I tendered, monitoring the twitching around his mouth. ‘Jed Westhaven. Maybe you …’

  Nodding, his face curved into recognition. ‘Lean guy, nervy? Eyes different colours?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the one.’

  ‘Haven’t seen him for a couple of days. People come and go round here. You coming in?’ he asked.

  I followed him, trying not to calculate what his flaw might be. He headed towards a flight of stairs, gestured for me to follow. The first step protested beneath him even though he couldn’t have weighed more than seventy kilos. The cat writhed and I put it down.

  The guy coughed as we reached the top. A line of numbered doors led down a hallway on the first floor. I couldn’t remember having been in that part of the house before.

  ‘Old friend?’ he asked.

  ‘Since we were ten.’

  He whistled, spit escaping his mouth. ‘I don’t know anyone from when I was a kid anymore, except my brother, but he lives in pommy land and doesn’t come back unless he has to.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘When our mum died – 2002. Of course, he got to do the eulogy.’

  ‘I meant Jed.’

  ‘Shit, I don’t know. What day is it?’

  ‘Friday.’

  He stopped in front of one of the doors, the numbers 1 and 7 nailed to it. The cat looked at it expectantly.

  ‘Must’ve been Wednesday night, then. I saw him as I was coming out my door here. Poor bastard looked like he’d seen a ghost – but then there are a fair few of them hanging round this place.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘Nah. He’s not much of a talker at the best of times.’ He shrugged. ‘Good bloke, your mate, but a bit fucked up.’

  I felt my hand harden into a fist at my side, then realised that, for all I knew, the Jed he’d met and the one I’d known were not the same man. In a way, it was the only explanation.

  ‘Anyway, his room’s down there,’ he said, pointing to the right, the cat looking in the direction he indicated. ‘Go all the way to the end, and it’s the second on your right. Maybe he’s around and I just haven’t seen him.’

  ‘Thanks … ?’

  ‘Terry.’

  Nodding, he held out his hand. I shook it. He unlocked his door and went inside.

  The place was a warren of wrinkled carpet and past glory. Radios were on in some of the rooms, the stations competing, something by Rod Stewart that should’ve stayed in the seventies, tendrils of incense smoke escaping around a half-open door. The cat followed me, close on my heels. Second on the right, Terry had said. I sidled up to it, but nothing about this door was confessional: not its colour, brown, or its number, 7, or even the deep gouge above the handle which looked to have been there a while.

  I almost knocked.

  The cat cocked its head.

  ‘So, is there anything you can tell me?’ I asked it. ‘Anything at all?’

  I tried the door, but it was locked. I resisted the impulse to rub off my prints. There was no place where he might have hidden the key; even the rim of the doorjamb was too narrow, though I ran my fingers across the top anyway.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ I asked the cat.

  It didn’t flinch, no doubt accomplice to a few felonies in its time. A true professional.

  After checking that no one was coming, I tried with my shoulder first, only part of my weight behind it. It gave a little, made a cracking sound, but remained closed. The cat bolted. I watched it go. Listened out, for the reduction in volume of one of the radios, or maybe an offer of a crowbar. But there was no change in the sounds of the building.

  This time I threw everything I had behind it, and the door sprung open. I fell into the room. There was a bed and bedside table, a bar fridge, an old cupboard, white walls.

  I closed the door.

  Sat on the bed.

  Felt the groove where a body had lain on it.

  Got up again.

  The beginnings of a sea breeze pushed through the open window. Filled the curtains. Disturbed a blank sheet of paper on the bedside table anchored by three books. I checked the titles. The Stuart Case. From the Republic of Conscience: An inter
national anthology of poetry. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which I’d once read on the Nigerian border while waiting to find out whether crossing it required a death wish. Turned out it did.

  I moved to the fridge, a magnet advertising an Indian takeaway holding a flyer for a gig at the Espy in five days’ time. Inside were two bottles of Brunswick Bitter and an unopened packet of cheddar, an overripe mango lying in a pool of its own juice. A half-eaten sushi roll, the lettuce wilted. Feeling a right born of years, I tried the drawer of the bedside table – coins, pens, a blister pack of Panadol, an unused condom – followed by the cupboard, wartime veneer with a decorative lock that didn’t put up much resistance. The pockets of his jackets were empty; one I recognised, the tear at the top of the sleeve from that day we’d climbed Hollow Mountain and he’d snagged it on a rocky overhang. The bed was hard, the single mattress new. The pillow I didn’t touch. Last, I checked the CD player; the disc in it had the word Kulini written across it in black texta.

  Nothing.

  But what had I been hoping for? A telltale diary entry? A suicide note? Jed wasn’t the type. You didn’t write about things, you did them. At least the Jed I’d known.

  I went back to the books.

  The Achebe had a bookplate in the front with the name Shirley Kenneth written in blue ink, but there were no annotations, no sections underlined. I picked up the poetry anthology and it fell open to a page marked by a photo. The poem was one of Gwen Harwood’s we’d done at school, about her sneaking out at dawn to shoot a barn owl with her father’s gun.

  I sat on the bed and read it again for the first time in years. Hay spiked with urine. The first shot. The single, flapping wing. Tried to remember which teacher had made us study it, a poem by a ‘Tasmanian poet’, how strange that had seemed to us, Harwood still alive then.

  a lonely child who believed death clean and final, not this obscene bundle of stuff

  I closed the book and returned it to the pile on the bedside table, minus the photo, which I checked for a date. There wasn’t one. The picture was dominated by a woman’s face, the background a uniform ochre, as if she was standing in front of a painted wall or a dune. She was almost smiling, though something was holding her back, her eyes focused intently on the photographer. Dark hair hung to her shoulders; hair only a little darker than her skin.

  Black skin.

  Something reproachful about her stare, as if she was accusing me.

  And then I realised who she must be. That I’d been right to come here – the poem with its presage of violence, this photo marking it, none of it coincidental.

  From up the hallway came the jangle of keys and what sounded like his name. I stood. Listened out for a hint of a trail, my nostrils flaring to the scent.

  The photo I slid into my back pocket.

  7

  The Espy – the Hotel Esplanade – all whitewash and billboards and ten-dollar offers. I climbed the stairs and went in. Ordered myself a beer and a burger from the girl at the bar and plonked myself down in front of the huge window that overlooked the bay, a place where I’d sat a thousand times, Sunday afternoons, comedy in the Gershwin room, the jokes hit-and-miss, names carved ardently into the windowsill. No one else was in that section of the hotel, though a few people were sitting outside at a table. A seagull circling a pavilion on the other side of the road, returned a little too thematically to the exact same perch from which it had left.

  Three guys came in, all wearing t-shirts promoting something, and moved towards the bargirl, who already looked like she was over her shift. They ordered beer – something Ossie – and she poured three pints of Coopers. They clinked glasses and volleyed a mix of prosts and nasdrovias and salutes. A Jeff Buckley song pumped through the speakers, one I hadn’t heard in years, vibrating falsetto with more than a gloss of heartache.

  ‘Man, that’s so sad,’ the tallest guy said to the bargirl, his accent unmistakably American. Then he launched into the details of Buckley’s death – the name of the branch of the Mississippi, a slackwater channel; that he was still wearing his boots – his attempt at seduction via tragedy shameless. But, going by the look on the girl’s face, he wasn’t getting any traction.

  ‘When he went under,’ said the guy in a last-ditch effort, ‘he was singing the chorus of “Whole Lotta Love”.’

  In my back pocket, I felt the clean edge of the photo. I slid it out and laid it on the table face up as a bell sounded. The girl behind the bar feigned an apologetic look and headed to the kitchen, the guy competing with Buckley, attempting a riff on the Zeppelin chorus, but she didn’t turn around. I held my glass up to the light. Drank the last of the beer that seemed to have vanished of its own accord.

  The photo stared back at me.

  The cheeks were fleshy triangles, lighter in colour than the rest of her skin, mahogany, jarrah maybe, some kind of wood.

  The eyes unflinching.

  Beyond, the water tore at its shores, reminding me of the story the Boonwurrung tell about the flooding of Port Phillip Bay. Five hundred generations long, it was still held in collective memory when white men first sailed into the bay, though it was not the one I’d learnt as a kid. I’d been told a story about the end of an age; about the retreat of glaciation and the separation of Tasmania and its people from the rest of Australia. The Boonwurrung story was one I’d hear much later, and at the time it had crossed my mind how different it would’ve been if, as a kid, I’d been told both versions side by side.

  The glossy paper of the photo had already developed a curve. I smoothed it, careful not to get it wet.

  ‘Bloody yanks, eh?’

  Standing above me was the bargirl, her bleached hair cut into one of those fringed bobs that always makes me think of French women. Wannabe Anaïs Nins. She put my burger on the table. Spun it around till the most presentable part of it was facing me, six huge chips stacked beside it as if sheer mass could make up for the lack of quantity. Leaning forwards a little, she squinted at the photo then looked out towards the bay. She sighed. ‘Only six hours to go.’

  ‘At least you’ve got company,’ I said, half smiling as I gestured to the guy with the rock-star one-liners.

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Doesn’t look like they’re going anywhere fast.’

  ‘I’m sure their mothers love them. Another beer?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘She’s pretty,’ she said, glancing at the photo as she collected my empty glass.

  I nodded, though pretty wasn’t the word I would’ve used; arresting, maybe, or affecting – like she had access to something you didn’t.

  Sighing once more, the bargirl returned to her penance.

  I prodded the bowl of sauce with one of the fat chips, but the hunger that had been plaguing me for the last hour or two had dissipated. The photo lay there, an artefact. Refused to give up the subject’s name. Jed had told me it, I knew he had, but for some reason I hadn’t retained it. I only remembered something he’d said about her that had struck me as strange at the time: She’s become my country.

  I took out my mobile and dialled a number I hadn’t called in years, the sequence conjuring the cluttered corner of the bench where their phone had sat beside a blue mug filled with pens and a pile of recycled school notices stapled together. And something else: all those prank calls we’d made when his parents were out. Mr Wall? Any Walls there? No? Better look out, your roof’s about to cave in!

  A woman answered, a tentative ‘Hello?’

  ‘Elaine?’

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘It’s Saul.’

  ‘Saul? Oh.’

  ‘How are you?’

  A silence ensued, the question too rife with consequence to allow for a simple answer.

  ‘Elaine, I know it’s probably not the right time, but there’s something I need to ask you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The girl he was with, up north …’

  ‘You mean Nara?’

  ‘Nara? That’s
right. Do you know where she is?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘She didn’t come back with him? To Melbourne?’

  ‘No. She stayed up there.’

  On the footpath on the other side of the road, palms swayed, their fronds like feathered headdresses arcing into the sky.

  Elaine cleared her throat. ‘I think she’s in Alice Springs.’

  ‘Alice?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Do you know her last name?’

  ‘I never met her. He hasn’t been back here since he left to go up north.’

  Her words sounded laboured, each hard won.

  I waited, trying to invoke the colour of their bench – orange maybe, their whole house a hangover from the seventies – and the shape of that burn mark from an experiment with lighter fluid gone wrong: whose idea had it been?

  ‘But I do know the name of the place she was from,’ Elaine said. ‘Where he was working. Ininyingi.’ She said it again, ‘Ininyingi,’ the emphasis falling this time on a different syllable, the last, as if she still hadn’t quite got the hang of it.

  ‘It’s past Alice, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. Out towards the border with Western Australia.’

  There was a trail of anger in her voice. A woman robbed. A dog barked in the background. They’d never had a dog.

  ‘Saul?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you speak to him?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Before.’

  ‘No. But he sent me a text. Three days ago.’

  ‘What did it say?’ she asked, an urgency in her voice.

  ‘He just asked me where I was.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did you say to him?’

  Her breathing was audible as she waited, and I monitored it for any desire to blame. Detected none. Though there was no escaping it – the sense that I should’ve, could’ve.

  ‘I told him I was in Sydney, but he didn’t text me back. I had no idea …’

  ‘None of us did.’

  The dog barked again. The rasp of a tissue being dragged across skin. A new song coming over the speakers by the bar. Hip-hop. Something about fucking.