Sydney Noir

by John Dale

  It’s kind of a relief that he’s gone, though, because his absence has freed me up to concentrate on my core values and vision. Don’t get me wrong, I still love him and think about him (I’m not some kind of monster), but it’s funny, he works better for me as a muse than an actual person. He allows me to think, and grow rich.

  THE PATTERNMAKER

  Julie Koh

  Ashfield

  I think he’s a detective until the night he gets his dick out.

  He’s been hanging around this block of flats all week. Around midnight every night, he’s appeared in the back car park, camera around his neck, looking shady. I only noticed him because I’ve been up late thinking about my runway collection. I’ve been bingeing on seasons of Real Couturier on my laptop, getting myself in the zone.

  I’ve started keeping the lights off so I can watch him from my window on the first floor. He’s tall and thin and pale as fuck, with long, terrible hair halfway between orange and brown. I’ve never seen him walk up the driveway from the street. He just appears. Maybe he’s been hiding in the separate laundry room out back. No one’s called the police on him yet.

  So tonight it’s raining and he’s standing under the back light staring up at my studio. But this time he’s wanking.

  I smoke and watch him. When the cigarette’s done, I slide the window frame up and stick my head out.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Hang on,” he says. “You’re not Cathy.”

  “Why should I be?”

  “Is she there?”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  He puts his thing away, zips his fly. “I want Cathy.”

  “You and the world. How tall are you?”

  “’Bout 180?”

  I think, why not? That’s a good height. Let’s bring this blue dick in from the cold.

  He comes up the back stairs, jumper soaked. Smells like a farm animal. But he has a good jawline and frame. Could be a good clotheshorse.

  He inspects my studio like he owns it. Walks all the way through without asking. Looks at the rolls of fabric, the cutting table, my little Juki sewing machine, my voodoo pin cushion, all crammed into the living room. He touches Ludmila, my dress form, on the waist. She’s just a torso.

  “Couldn’t afford one with legs,” I say.

  He moves on to the kitchen, bathroom, and bedrooms, then plonks himself on the couch.

  “Happy?” I say.

  “I knew Cathy’s couch would be red. Cathy wears red a lot.”

  “It’s my couch.”

  “Cathy’s really pretty.”

  “Cathy this, Cathy that,” I say.

  “Where is Cathy?”

  “You’re the stalker. You tell me.”

  He looks at the wall, hums some tune.

  “Stay for a movie,” I say, “and I’ll tell you where she went.”

  I get my laptop and click on a rom-com. We watch the whole thing. Right before it ends, the friends of the main character tell him he’s made a mistake. He panics, sprints down streets, knocks over a newspaper stand, finds the girl, gets her back. I knew you were the one, he tells her. They kiss at the top of a tower. People clap. Credits roll.

  The wanker asks where Cathy is again. I say I’ll tell him later.

  He says his name is Mugzy. Isn’t even a nickname. Is he going to break out into some shitty rap?

  No wonder he has to get his cock out in car parks.

  * * *

  Mugzy turns up every night. Stands outside in the same place. Waits until I open the window and call him up.

  He’s twenty-three. So young I could’ve pushed him out of my own cunt.

  He does what I tell him to do. I say do the dishes, he does the dishes. I say do the ironing, he does the ironing. I send him to Ashfield Mall to buy sanitary pads and Handee paper towels. He stands still for me to take his measurements. He’s a perfect robot. He thinks I’m going to give him Cathy’s address.

  “I like this flat,” he says one night while we’re at the cutting table. I’m fitting him with a mino, a cape I’ve made of straw.

  “It isn’t a flat, it’s a fashion studio. Downstairs is vacant. You can rent it.”

  “Got no cash.”

  Mugzy says he’s living in some couple’s spare room in Burwood. He’s been doing odd jobs—mowing lawns, moving furniture. No one will give him a proper gig.

  Mugzy says he wants to become a private investigator to bring in more money. He got the idea when he met me. He shows me an ad he’s put up on Gumtree. Protecting Sydney since 2017, it reads. He thinks his stalking skills are transferable to this new kind of work. His stalking is all self-directed, he says. He’s set himself a lot of challenging assignments.

  But all the self-direction is taking up too much of his time. So much that there isn’t enough left to fit in paid jobs. He’s having trouble making rent. Mugzy says he’s a millennial, and that millennials change jobs all the time. When he gets tired of being a shitfuck-famous investigator, he’s going to be a shitfuck-famous street photographer.

  “We’re gonna be a massive power couple,” he says. “Everyone’s gonna talk about us all the time.”

  “I thought you wanted Cathy.”

  I tell him I’ll give him Cathy’s address if he agrees to be my star runway model when I get to the final of Real Couturier.

  “Two birds, one stone,” he grins. “Yah, boy.”

  * * *

  Mugzy wants to know more about Cathy.

  “Nice girl with shit for brains,” I say.

  Everyone swiped right on Cathy all her life. Pretty, big eyes, midtwenties. An international student from Hong Kong living on her family’s money. She went on all the time about her awesome parents but ignored their calls. She made faces at my fashion sketches.

  “Too weird,” she used to say. “And not in a good way.”

  She moved out to be with her loaded white boyfriend in his flash apartment on the other side of the bridge.

  She met him at salsa class in Darling Harbour. He was wearing a gray fedora, and a pinstriped waistcoat with nothing underneath. His triceps popped, she said. She called him my man.

  “My man and I are going hiking,” she’d say. “My man and I are doing salsa.”

  I think of her and her man doing salsa and fucking. Salsa, fuck, salsa, fuck, in their boring salsafucking clothes.

  “Wearing a hat—it’s called peacocking,” says Mugzy, when I tell him how they met. “I’m reading it in a pickup book. Girls love that shit. He probably pretended to be interested in her friend first. Probably negged her with backhanded compliments. Works like a dream.”

  * * *

  When Cathy told me she was moving over the bridge, we were having dumplings at Shanghai Night.

  “Ashfield never matched my vision of myself,” she said, and popped a xiaolongbao into her mouth with a fork.

  She saw me looking at her shiny pink nails.

  “I found an awesome nail salon in Balmain,” she said. “Eighty bucks for a shellac mani-pedi. A girl with a good mani-pedi is a girl who is living her best life.”

  I watched those nails and that fork shovelling xiaolongbaos into that mouth, and I couldn’t work out what Cathy had that I didn’t have. I had a good personality. I was okay-looking. But then again, I didn’t have control over my cuticles.

  The day she left, I woke up to a pink Post-it on the fridge: B the change u wish 2 c in the world.

  Lucky I didn’t take her advice or I would’ve slapped that Post-it on her chest and stabbed her through it. Would’ve left her posted to the kitchen wall, shellacked toes off the lino.

  That’s a change I wanted to see.

  * * *

  I spend all my cash on a cardboard coffin off the Internet. It comes on a Monday morning. Two guys deliver it. They slide it under my cutting table, next to the couch. The coffin has a wood veneer and gold handles and a white satin lining.

  “That looks like a lot of money,” says Mugzy, when
he comes in that night.

  “It’s make-or-break time,” I say, pulling on the ends of the tape measure hanging around my neck. “Fame is built on sacrifice.”

  When people push in front of me in lines at the supermarket, or expect me to step off the footpath for them in the street, the thing they don’t know about me is I’m gonna be famous. Even more shitfuck famous than Mugzy. I’m gonna get out of this hole in Ashfield and I’m gonna go to New York and I’m gonna win Real Couturier. And at the final in Vanderbilt Hall, my models are gonna lie in a line of coffins in their shrouds on the runway.

  And my favorite judge, Ava Rodriguez, editorial director of KELLERMAN, is going to warn me beforehand about how risky my runway collection is.

  “Don’t make it too costumey,” she’ll say.

  And I’ll say, “But I’m drawing on my culture.”

  And she’ll say, “But how is this commercial, Rioko?”

  And I’ll say, “Just you wait, Ava, I’ll show you.”

  My line is going to transcend all of fashion. It’s going to be spiritual. It’s going to be Japanese warrior-prince ghost-god, with shrouds and death and destruction.

  All the contestants on Real Couturier work closely with a key model, and now Mugzy’s mine. I’m going to make him into a shinto spirit god from another world. Shinto gods bring blessings. They can’t exist without people believing in them. And when we get onstage at Vanderbilt Hall, I’m going to show everyone this new god and send him off in a ritual with all the other models and their coffins.

  Mugzy’s new cape is already done. Now I’m making him a linen shroud that covers everything except his face. When I send him to the show’s makeup team, the look I’m going to ask for is snow white, with pink around the eyes.

  The only problem is that the day after the coffin arrives, I get another reminder letter about overdue rent. I’ve spent my entire design budget on the coffin. I can’t afford the studio anymore. But you just have to not give a shit about anything. You’ve gotta go for your goals with your whole heart. I mean, the day before Cathy went, I lost my job in the city. Redundant, they called me. They were taking manufacturing and development to Vietnam. They had no need for patternmakers like me.

  It was a sign from the universe. It was a sign I was going to win Real Couturier. I took over Cathy’s bedroom and turned the flat into a design studio. I bought all these rolls of fabric, and Ludmila. Put a cutting table in. And all I’m doing, day in, day out, while the money drains away, is training for fame.

  All my chips are on Real Couturier.

  * * *

  Sometimes I duck under the cutting table and get in the coffin for a nap. While I drift off, I think about Nara.

  I think of my parents being buried together. Two mounds side by side. People said I was home when they died, but I can’t remember it. I was five. After it happened, an older kid on my street asked me how it felt to have had parents with a death wish. There was empty space in my head where the answer should have been.

  My grandfather took me in. He did calisthenics in the yard every morning and had a big goldfish tank in his house that had plastic seaweed at the bottom. He called me his little goldfish.

  One afternoon I overheard him arguing with his new wife about what they were going to do with me. She didn’t like that I never spoke. She’d also found an exercise book that I’d filled with drawings of oni—red-faced demons standing in fields of blind snakes.

  “This girl brings disaster,” the wife said.

  While they argued, I went to the tank and scooped up a goldfish with one hand. I took it into the garden and dug a shallow hole and dropped it in. Looking at me sideways from the dirt, its eye was as wide and blank as always. It squirmed and tried to flip. Its lips sucked air. When I was done burying it, I put a rock on top. Then I went back to the tank and did the same with the other fish, one by one, until they all lay in a nice row of mounds topped with rocks.

  When my grandfather came out to find me, he went white. He asked me to explain. I couldn’t tell him why I did it.

  The wife locked me out of the house all afternoon. Then she locked me out of Nara. They put me on a plane to Sydney to live with my mother’s sister.

  “You are a stone around my neck,” this aunt used to say.

  I was no one’s little goldfish anymore. At school, girls called me a dog. They spread rumors that I didn’t wash my hands or take showers.

  When I became a patternmaker, the other women at my company avoided me. They never invited me out for coffee, or bought me cake on my birthday.

  At work, I had all these big ideas no one liked. I wanted to improve the clients’ designs—like add funeral veils to floaty summer dresses.

  “Be sensible, Rioko,” my manager would say. “It isn’t commercial. It’s too expensive. The designs are already done. Your role here is to make the patterns.”

  So I made the patterns. I stayed late most nights because I had nowhere else to be. Sometimes, on the way home from work, I fucked guys. I found them on a dating app. I got them to meet me in alleyways, and we’d fuck against the wall. Once I met up with a guy on a one-way street off Liverpool Road, just past midnight. He showed up wearing a rubber mask. The mask was the face of a rat.

  “You’re so small I could pick you up,” he said.

  He grabbed me by my hair, swung me hard against the wall, shoved his fingers between my legs. When he went to unzip his pants, I ran.

  “Scurry, scurry, little yellow rat,” he called after me. “Let’s see you run!”

  * * *

  Lying in the coffin in the afternoon, I’m talking about myself in the third person. I read once on a psychology blog that it helps with performance.

  “Rioko had no one,” I say. “But she had grit, and that’s what counted.”

  Someone is knocking at the door.

  “What would Rioko do? Rioko would see who’s there.”

  It’s the old lady landlord. She serves me with a termination notice. Says I’m fourteen days late with the rent.

  “But Rioko only got the reminder the other day.”

  “That was eleven days ago.”

  The notice says I have two weeks to move out unless I pay what I owe, or agree on a repayment plan.

  “Rioko doesn’t have any money,” I say. “She had to buy the coffin.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s the paparazzi, isn’t it? They want you to lure Rioko into the open.”

  “If you can’t pay, you’ll have to be out by the end of June.”

  “Rioko will get you that cash,” I say. “She’s on the edge of glory.”

  When the old lady leaves, I do five sets of star jumps and some of Cathy’s classic Zumba moves. No more time for sleep. My eye is on the prize. I’m going to get that hundred grand and that KELLERMAN cover shot. I’m going to take what I deserve. Little landlady will grovel at my feet—beg me to live in her fugly flat in her nowhere suburb—and I’ll tell her, It’s too late, lady, you should’ve been nice to me before I made it big, I own a million-pound converted graveyard in the English countryside now.

  The fashion stakes have never been higher. Every vein in my body is electric. I take my scissors to the linen and cut, cut, cut.

  * * *

  At night, I try out white makeup paste on Mugzy’s face, to see how it looks. But even though I’m the one making him into a god, he’s still hung up on Cathy. He says he’s saving himself for her.

  He wants a break. He goes downstairs to wank alone, looking up at the flat.

  I follow him down and stand next to him.

  “I’m trying to get back to the root of the purity of my love,” he says.

  He pants and his hand gets fast and furious, and I look up with him at the flat. Then I put my fingers down my underwear and touch myself. I look at him and he looks at me, and I pull my fingers out and bring them to my lips and lick them.

  “Fuck you,” he says.

  He pushes me down onto the concrete on all
fours and slides in quick, and while he’s fucking me in the driveway like a dog, he says, “I want a nice Cathy the other guys want. A nice Cathy with nice friends. A nice Cathy who goes to the gym every morning, and salsa every week.”

  We fuck again upstairs on Cathy’s red couch. He pees on my chest. I sit on his face and say, “Fuck Cathy. All the pretty Cathys in the world don’t want us. Nobody’s gonna run back for us through the streets, telling us they’ve made a mistake.”

  “Speak for yourself,” says Mugzy, when it’s over. “Nobody wants you. And why would a guy like me want you if no one else does?”

  * * *

  I’ve got Mugzy into the cape and shroud, and now his entire face is caked with white. I look at him in the full-length mirror, surrounded by burning incense, and he really is a god. The TV crew is already filming the final episode. They’re watching us prep for the runway show and get preliminary feedback from the judges.

  Ava Rodriguez is there on the red couch. My grandfather sits next to her, a goldfish suffocating in his hand. He shakes his head at me.

  “You’re from Nara,” he says. “Why do you need this lady to tell you what’s good?”

  I ignore him. He’s only here because he knows I’m about to win. I’ll thank him for nothing on the runway.

  I tell Ava that my theme is “Ritual and Sacrifice.”

  “Is it too ‘warrior prince’?” Ava says. “Is it too literal, screaming ‘the Orient’? Is it fashion-forward enough, or editorial enough? These are the questions I and the other judges have to ask. Do you really have what it takes, Rioko? What if you really are just a patternmaker, and not a real couturier? What happened to Cathy, your original model? Why have you got this dropkick instead?”