Sydney Noir

by John Dale

  “Fred said you might need an assistant,” I said. I did need work. I liked the idea of being back in a darkroom, the closeness of the space, the fumes of the magical chemicals, the concentration.

  “Let’s talk,” he said. The young woman reached for the bottle. He tilted his glass toward her and she refilled it. “Come and see me at the studio. Two-forty Denis Street. Not far. Other side of Balmain.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “When?”

  He waved his glass around a bit so that the wine came close to sloshing over the edge. “Next week will do. You can usually find me there. Don’t make it too early.”

  One of his pieces hung on the wall across from us, a photograph of Virginia. She looked as I remembered her when we met in high school, her dark hair long and wavy, her lipsticked mouth somewhere between sullen and humorous. Her face was the only spot of light in the image, shadowy trees in the background, her arm on a fence collapsing under the weight of ivy.

  Fred put one hand on my shoulder. “Now excuse me while I mingle,” he said, smiling, his work done, the introduction made, the favor conferred.

  * * *

  I was making my way along the stone path that led to the front gate, when Skye appeared, stepping on tiptoe over pebbles and the hard little seeds from overhanging bottlebrush trees. “Where are you going?” she asked, falling into step beside me.

  “Home.” Back to Surry Hills where I was staying in a musician friend’s flat, empty while he was on tour. Home didn’t sound right.

  “Do you still sell drugs?” she asked.

  I stopped and faced her. “What? How old are you, fourteen?”

  “You were fourteen,” she said. “You and Virginia.” She was wrong, but not by much. By fifteen we were trying something new every weekend.

  “Forget it,” I said. “And no, I don’t.”

  She came closer and put her fingers around my wrist and bit her lip. Her eyes were bloodshot and I wondered whether she was stoned. I pulled my wrist away, hard.

  “Ow,” she said in a hurt little voice.

  Fred called her name from the deck. I headed toward the gate.

  “Fuck you, Rob,” she called after me.

  Most of the time in high school I had envied Virginia her family, but there were times like now when I closed the gate behind me with a sense of escape that took me by surprise with its force.

  * * *

  A few days later I found myself at the Clock Hotel in Surry Hills, drinking alone. Years ago this had been a frequent haunt of the old crowd, as Fred had affectionately called them. Since then it had received a makeover and now sold boutique beer. I didn’t expect to see any old faces, but then I caught sight of one at the other end of the bar. Finn. He had grown a long, solid-looking beard, and it took me a moment to recognize him. He glanced over and saw me and frowned and smiled at the same time. His hair had grown longer, and it suited him, like the beard. He walked over with his glass in hand.

  We talked about what he was doing and what he was planning to do, a familiar conversation. He was working on some amazing home brew, organic and heirloom, he said, better than this overpriced shit at the Clock. Planning to develop it, expand. He always had ambitions that he made sound convincing. I wondered if he was still selling from here. I remembered Fred’s anxiety, and asked Finn if he was in touch with Julian. He shook his head. “Weird,” he said. “No one’s seen him.” Julian had put in an order with him, he told me, a month or two earlier, not a big one, just a small one, but he never showed up to collect. “I thought maybe he’d taken off overseas, like you.” He smiled. “Or somewhere. Maybe there was some kind of trouble, I don’t know. He always said he wanted to go to Tasmania.” He shrugged. “Maybe he just moved back to Cremorne. What does Virginia have to say?” He tried to sound casual.

  “He’s away for work.”

  “What about her sister?” he asked.

  “What? Skye?”

  Finn put his glass down on the bar and studied it. “Too bitter for an IPA.”

  “What about her?”

  “Just wondering,” he said. “She’s a bit of a wild child. And now I’m off. Internet dating.” He smoothed his beard. We said goodbye.

  * * *

  I lost my way a couple of times getting to March’s studio, turning through old streets no wider than a lane, sandstone curbstones and asphalt footpaths broken up by eucalyptus roots. Glimpses of water, eerily flat in the late-afternoon light, showed through gaps between houses, and glinted through windows in Victorian terraces with all the inner walls knocked out, everything given over to the view beyond. Expensive cars were parked on March’s block with half their wheels up on the curb to make space for other vehicles to pass through the narrow street. I recognized Virginia’s old car, a blue 1980s Mercedes sedan, parked at a haphazard angle. She worked for the gallery that represented March; she was visiting for something to do with that, probably, and I was surprised to find that I didn’t particularly want her to be here. A high wooden gate in a brick fence led to the studio, a tall boxy structure clad in corrugated iron and half covered in creeping ivy, set back from a brick courtyard. The front door was ajar, but there was no answer when I knocked. The place was heavy with quiet, cut with the sounds of insects intermittently buzzing.

  “Hello?” I called as I pushed the door. Inside was an open space like a warehouse with a room toward the back that looked like a darkroom. A half-assembled motorcycle sat in one corner surrounded by parts and tools. Stairs led to a loft, a bed strewn with clothes. Blinds let through slivers of light.

  March lay on a low sofa, his eyes closed. Skye sat in a high-backed leather armchair across from him in front of a white fabric screen, hands resting neatly on the arms of the chair, her head tipped back, eyes open and unfocused. Her tawny hair was down and she was naked. Between her and March was a camera on a tall tripod. I waited for one of them to stir, but neither of them did.

  “Skye?” I said. She was wearing long dangling earrings of silver and jade and they swung as she turned her head toward me. She smiled dreamily.

  Stuff covered every surface apart from a clear space around Skye’s chair: ashtrays, books, glasses, bowls, vases full of dead flowers. March hadn’t moved; I looked closer and saw the belt around his arm, the syringe on the coffee table. His lips were tinged with blue.

  “Fuck,” I said. I knelt by him and put my fingers to his wrist, his throat. Nothing. His skin felt warm.

  “Fuck,” Skye said, in a mumbled echo.

  His head lolled when I pressed his throat again, and this time I felt it, a feeble beat. I pulled out my phone. No signal. “Is there a landline?” I asked her.

  She sighed. “Somewhere.”

  I saw a telephone on a table, a plastic handset with a tangled curly cord, and dialed, and gave the information. An ambulance would be with us shortly, I was told. I looked through the cabinets in the bathroom, the stinking darkroom and the untidy bookshelves, to see if there was any Naloxone. There wasn’t. Skye hadn’t moved from her chair. I found her clothes behind a sofa and brought them to her. She held them limply.

  I checked March again, tried to pull him upright, and managed to get his head elevated on a couple of cushions. His chest rose and fell with shallow breaths, ribs visible through his thin shirt. I didn’t want to look at him.

  He wasn’t dead. I repeated that to myself, fought to stave off the panic. Part of me was back in a Hoxton bedroom, frantic, hopeless; time was a plastic spool of film and sound that stuttered and spun like a trap. I tried to close it off, focused on examining the camera while Skye started to dress. It was a beautiful machine, a Canon with a lens that would have cost as much as a first-class ticket to London. It held old-fashioned film, no digital screen to scroll back through. I opened the camera and pulled out the film. There were a few other rolls on the table and I pocketed them. Skye was still struggling to get her T-shirt over her head. I went over to a bookcase with a shelf of photo albums and pulled them out, looked through until I came t
o one filled with pictures of her and other girls. Not Virginia. I saw enough before I closed it to see that they were not all recent; some of Skye were a couple of years old at least. Beautifully composed, printed on quality paper, artful and obscene and poisonous. I pulled out another album. More girls, older-looking prints. I fought the urge to tear them all to shreds. I left the album open on the coffee table for the medics, and held on to the one with pictures of Skye. It felt like a futile gesture. There was probably a computer somewhere with a whole vault of digital versions of the images.

  I found the keys to the Mercedes in Skye’s miniature leather backpack, in among cigarettes, sticky pots of lip gloss, gum, and coins. A siren sounded in the distance. There seemed to be little point waiting and I badly wanted to be somewhere else.

  “Let’s go,” I said. She stood up and pulled her shirt down to her waist. Her hips were narrow as a boy’s. “Put on your skirt.” I looked away. She glanced at March for the first time and blinked. He was still breathing. “The ambulance is on the way,” I said.

  “Why?” she asked. She reached for a clear flat plastic bag of tablets, little white oblongs, on the coffee table near an ashtray.

  “Leave it,” I told her, but she held on to it and I didn’t feel like arguing.

  * * *

  The sirens were properly loud, just blocks away, by the time we reached the Mercedes. I opened the passenger door for Skye but she ignored me and slumped into the back. I sat behind the wheel and turned the key. The engine kicked into life with a deep grumble. I remembered the feel of the hand brake, and had a sudden memory of Virginia in the driver’s seat, her hands on the wheel, the loose elegance of her slim wrists. The gears creaked.

  The weather had changed; storm clouds turned the light dim and green, and rain spattered the car roof. A pair of white cockatoos swooped onto the telegraph pole at the end of the block, screaming in outrage.

  “Home, James,” Skye said, and laid herself down on the backseat. I couldn’t tell whether she understood what she had witnessed, or if she didn’t care.

  “Put your seat belt on,” I said.

  “Fuck you, Rob,” she mumbled. The earrings made a little thump as she dropped them onto the floor.

  * * *

  Maureen opened the door when I rang the bell. I had the album under one arm, Skye’s backpack over my shoulder, Skye leaning on my other arm. “I found her at Derek March’s studio,” I told Maureen.

  “Okay, come in,” she said after a long pause. “Virginia isn’t home.”

  Skye let go of me and headed toward the bathroom.

  Maureen poured herself a glass of wine in the kitchen, but didn’t offer me anything. “Thank you, Rob. It’s such a problem, with Skye. Chemicals,” she said disapprovingly, as though Skye had been shooting up bleach. “It’s out of control,” she complained, but she didn’t sound convincing. “I’ve tried to tell Fred.” I wondered if she hadn’t heard what I’d said. She turned away, putting the bottle back in the fridge.

  “She was at March’s studio,” I repeated, and put the album on the kitchen counter. I thought about how to tell her about what I had seen. And then I saw the way she was looking at the album, and the way she looked back at me. There was anxiety in her face, but it wasn’t for Skye. I had the feeling that the contents of the album would not be a surprise to her. I remembered Virginia’s stories, of being taken to the studio by Maureen with Skye, being left to play with the pottery wheel in the courtyard while the adults stayed inside.

  “He overdosed,” I said. “We left before the ambulance got there.”

  “The ambulance?” she asked, frowning. She felt for her necklace, a string of chunky, colorful beads.

  “He’ll be okay.”

  “But you said an ambulance? What happened?”

  I tried to sound confused and stupid to deflect her questions, my patience suddenly gone. “I don’t know where they would have taken him,” I told her. “The Balmain Hospital? I don’t know. Sorry.”

  She looked weary and disappointed in me. I imagined that Skye was familiar with this look; Virginia and Fred too. I didn’t believe that she was ignorant of any of it: the drugs, the photographs. She took a packet of cigarettes from a high corner shelf—a halfhearted hiding place—and lit one. Skye shuffled out of the bathroom toward the lounge and the bleep of the television being turned on reached us a few seconds later.

  The pathway was slippery with rain as I made my way to the street, but the storm had passed; already there was a patch of hollow blue sky over the bridge. I walked the meandering blocks to Darling Street and down to the water to wait for a ferry.

  * * *

  Virginia called me later that night. I had drunk with dedicated speed at the first place I found at the quay, a cramped pub in the Rocks full of American tourists, but it didn’t blunt anything as much as I wanted it to and I left when the karaoke started. Virginia thanked me, demure and sincere sounding. Maureen hadn’t told her about the photos, it turned out, and she was quietly furious when I explained. She remembered a session Skye had done for March the previous year, but thought that had been the last time, and it had seemed to be above board, something for his new series.

  “I took the film,” I said.

  “It will be on his computer, though, or someone’s computer,” she said.

  “I know.” It was probably just a matter of time before the photographs showed up online, if they weren’t there already. I was in no hurry to find out. “I have your car keys,” I told her. I had found them in my pocket when I reached for my own door key.

  Virginia made an impatient noise. “I can’t believe she took the car again.” There was a big age gap between them, ten years, enough to make the sibling relationship tenuous, but Virginia’s exasperation somehow seemed entirely belonging to a sister. She downplayed her protective instincts, as though they were an embarrassment, and irritation was one of her covers.

  I couldn’t tell if our stalled exchange was one of intimacy or estrangement. I set the canisters on the kitchen counter and pulled out the rolls of film, flimsy ribbons that turned dead brown in the light.

  * * *

  Skye answered the door when I went over the next day to return the keys. Despite the heat, she was wearing tracksuit pants with a hooded jacket zipped all the way up, her whole body covered apart from her bare feet. I pushed away a memory of her golden skin against the leather chair in the studio. Her cheekbones glittered with powder.

  “Come on in,” she said, and I followed her. Burning December sun poured in through all the glass. The bridge was a crisp piece of geometry across the water, the view fringed with drooping gums, a postcard. “Virginia’s at the gallery. Some kind of photocopier emergency? You can wait for her if you want.” I held on to the keys in my pocket, unreasonably disappointed. Skye folded her arms with her back to the light. “I was just about to take the boat out. Do you want to come?”

  “Sailing?”

  “Yes, stupid.” She went to the door and slipped her feet into canvas sandshoes. I had never learned to like sailing, the few times Virginia had taken me. But my hangover made me slow and pliant; I went along with it.

  * * *

  The sailboat slid through the water, out from the shade of the dock and into the bright afternoon. The deck was scrubbed clean and white, and I sat on a bench near the stern and closed my eyes for a moment. The harsh sun and salt spray felt kind for those long seconds, convinced me that they could scrub me clean too. Skye moved with compact assurance as she adjusted the sail, coiled ropes, tied complicated knots. I didn’t embarrass myself by trying to help. She stepped down into the small cabin and came back with a bottle of water.

  “Thanks for yesterday,” she said, handing me the bottle. She said it as though it was any old thing, no big deal. “He’s fine, by the way. Apparently.”

  Half my night had been spent fighting memories of March’s prone body, the terrible bluish slackness of his skin, and the other half dreaming of London. All night wit
h the comatose and the dead.

  “No worries,” I said.

  The water around us sparkled and shined, giving away nothing of its true depth, and the boat rocked gently. Skye unzipped her jacket and sat across from me with her elbows on her knees and talked. She had been photographed by March for his “private collection” a few times, she said. He didn’t pay her in money, only in drugs. She made it sound like a fair swap, or rather she was convincing herself that it was.

  “Isn’t he friends with Maureen?” I asked.

  She snorted. “Friends. Yeah.”

  I asked about Fred.

  “He loves Derek. He loves all that free-spirit, hippie artistic bullshit,” she said. “He just sees what he wants to see. Like everyone.” Skye checked the sail, lifted a snaking end of coiled rope, dropped it again. “So, do you have anything on you?” she asked, standing with one hand on her hip.

  “You keep asking me that,” I said.

  “Yeah, I do.” She shrugged her hoodie off, leaving her shoulders bare in a thin camisole, flirting. She stepped closer so that we were almost touching.

  “Skye, come on,” I said, shifting. “Don’t.”

  Her expression clouded. “I hope you got a good look yesterday. Enjoy yourself?”

  I drank my water, shook my painful head. This whole sailing thing was a mistake.

  She collected her hoodie from the floor. “Julian wasn’t as pure and good as you,” she said. “He loved to come out for a sail.” She played with the zipper, which seemed to have stuck, and tossed the thing onto the bench across from me. “He used to make me a drink, a ‘Julian Special.’” She bit her thumb, chewing the worn-down nail, worrying the skin with her teeth.

  The bottled water started to taste stale and metallic. It took a moment to understand what she was telling me, and then another moment for the instinctive disbelief to fall sickeningly away.

  “Dad thinks he was such a saint,” she went on. “I said I’d tell him. I’d tell Virginia. He said I wouldn’t, and that even if I did, he’d just say it was bullshit and I was a jealous little bitch, jealous little sister. And he said everyone knew about March’s photos, everyone knew I was a slut.”