In a second I’m knocking on Marylou’s door. I feel in that instant of stout, dangerous hope that my life is whole, that all the missing parts of the puzzle have snapped together. I knock again. She must be in the bathroom. Then, after a moment or two, I knock a third time, because there is no answer. Finally, I nudge the door gently. Her bedroom door is wide open. I can see her empty easy chair and her books lined up on the windowsill. They are all there, The Transit of Venus, Bosnian Chronicle, The Portrait of a Lady, Chekhov’s short stories, Emily Dickinson … But Middlemarch, the one she’s reading now, is not lying open on the bed or anywhere else. Middlemarch is gone. Her clothes seem to be there, but the jeans and the violet sweater she had on at the airport have disappeared. I feel sick all over and breathe very slowly, as if air has become a rare commodity. I wait, trying to gather my wits. But all I’m able to explain to myself is that she’s gone. Something about the room insists she’s no longer here. Her backpack has gone too. I look in the bathroom. There are no toiletries. I come out and sit on her bed and stare out her window. That’s when I discover how the precariousness of love is grounding. I notice the grain and patterns in the whitewash, the texture of the window’s glass, the size of my feet, the maps of my veins on the top of my hands. I notice the length of my breaths.
After a time, I don’t know how long, I get up and go down the stairs. Something in me has given up all hope of ever seeing her again.
The bell has just tinkled behind a departing customer. Verity is standing in the shop. One look at me brings her to my side.
‘What’s the matter, Harold? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘Marylou has gone.’
‘Nonsense. Marylou wouldn’t go without saying goodbye. She went out with Ben.’
‘Ben!’ I roar.
‘Yes, Ben. Keep your hat on. What’s the matter with that? He called to see you and she was here, talking to me. So he asked her out for a coffee.’
‘How long ago was that?’
She looked at her watch.
‘Oh, about an hour ago.’
I run to the door, meaning to hurl myself down the street and scour all the cafés. And then I stop like a clock on the threshold. Ben and Marylou are closer in age. I’ll be forty in four years. I’m slightly haggard, out of it, I know, with my passion for an older woman, my living in the street of Marylou’s awful memories, my coming home to my mother, my moon jar. I should just leave well enough alone. I turn round and stare at Verity as if she were a statue in an old Czech cathedral. I’ve seen pictures of St Vitus in Prague. The atmosphere of the place, its tree-like columns, its majestic gloom, and the feeling of spring woven into its old stone. I turn round, I turn away from that street which contains Marylou, I turn to Verity and stare at her.
She stands there and I see that old Irish smile lurking in her eyes. For a second, I’m surprised at how little like Liběna she really is.
‘She’s not gone, Harold. How can you think that?’
I must look like a giant snared rabbit, because she comes at me and hugs me. I grasp at her. Flotsam, jetsam, ligan and derelict, I am.
I push the toiletries, the Middlemarch and her backpack to the back of my mind – I’d rather believe Verity for the next ten seconds. But like Thelma and Louise when they drive off that cliff after a handshake, I know that I’m going to crash to the bottom if there’s no Marylou.
I’m that unshapely, frontierless lump again, the one I brought back here from Seoul. Verity puts her hand on my arm.
‘Harold, she’s only gone out for a coffee.’
My eyes try to focus, but they get lost on the way back to her face. All I can see are the pictures of tempestuous seas, of waves hurling themselves out of their frames.
Maruška liked the god Proteus, that minor Poseidon. She used to tell me stories about how he would change shape as soon as you tried to hold him. You had to squeeze your eyes shut and hang on to his squirming form every time he morphed into a different monster. If you never gave in to fear or recoiled from whatever horrible animal he changed into as you clung to him, he would eventually return to his real self. If only I could do that with what is happening now. If only I could go up the stairs and see Middlemarch on the shelf. I try and find my voice in my throat but it’s full of dry rocks. I clear it, with a rough, raking, rather disgusting noise.
‘No, Verity – the book she’s reading has gone and all her toiletries and her backpack. Her backpack is gone.’
‘She probably needed it to go out shopping. To put things in it, Harold. You have to trust.’
‘Trust?’
The word returns like a boomerang.
‘Verity. Her passport is gone.’
‘Surely she put it in her bag for safety’s sake.’
I pull myself together.
‘At least if she’s with Ben, that means she’s better, right?’
Verity shakes her head at me.
20
Ben
I’VE ALWAYS HATED it when people say ‘life goes on’. It doesn’t. It sputters out. Verity walks around with a slight frown, as if she were sifting through some subtle reasoning. She still won’t believe Marylou has gone without any warning. I look at her as some atheist might envy a simpler soul, or someone freezing might covet a neat pile of logs stacked against a house. Some people seem to know all about leaving, divesting, floating, forgetting. Then there are those who pick up, repair and remember. Verity is such a one.
She doesn’t insist or fuss. She just goes about her business. That evening we said goodnight, and the next one too. She seemed to be hanging around at the end of the day, proposing a drink or a bowl of salad with cheese in her tiny garden. I didn’t stay long because I wanted to spare her my gloom and doom. Then it rained. There was so much rain I kept worrying Marylou was getting drenched. Now the second morning without her has come. I am going to the moon jar today, just as I went yesterday. One thing I don’t bother about, however, is looking for Ben – even though Verity begs me to.
With this useless hoping, she exhibits something Zen in ignoring the result of her efforts, which I find admirable in some recess of my mind. Anyway, I know why I’m giving up. There’s something about Ben that brings light to the world. He’s like a preacher who doesn’t preach, like some angel without any wings. Pure, bare kindness with a sense of humour – what more can one wish for in anyone? But why didn’t she say goodbye? That’s left unsaid in the air of The Sea & Us, an invisible smoke parching our throats, a spell we can’t dispel. And why won’t I see Ben? Because I can’t bear the idea of seeing Ben.
Today, as I walk to the workshop again, the weather is beautiful, washed clean by the downpour. But the only thing it prompts me to think is that she’ll be warm.
I’ve found there’s something clean about missing someone until you can’t quite breathe. The pain itself becomes a form of company, an extra bone in your body – it hurts all the time and keeps you in the presence of what you’ve lost. This could be perverse, but I don’t think so.
I wonder how Liběna has fared in that department. I pull out my phone.
‘Maminko?’
‘Harruld. Something is wrong?’
Kundera says in Immortality that Czechs have a maximum richness of feeling, while the French and the Russians are more sentimental, with less feeling. He’s got a point.
I clear my throat of the permanent frog living there now and she says, ‘I will be so happy when I see you again, Harruld.’
‘Maminko. Marylou is gone.’
‘She will come back, Harruld, if it is good for you both.’
‘You’re right, Maminko,’ I say softly. ‘Thank you.’
And I hang up.
I move like an automaton and give myself tiny goals. Push the door open, walk into the long, low room, say hello to Syn – but she stops me with a graceful wave of her hand. As usual it’s an effort to brave her seamless composure.
‘Harold, how are you going with that large piece? The profe
ssor has been in here again. He’s interested in it.’
‘You didn’t show it to him?’
‘No, don’t worry. I wouldn’t do that. I just told him what you were working on. He wants to see you too.’
‘See me?’
‘Don’t look so surprised. Why wouldn’t he want to see you, if he likes your work?’
Her unflappable demeanour has me feeling as though I’m gazing at her across a vast ocean. Verity’s framed waves fill my head for a second. Very useful, those things are. They seem to have become part of the furniture of my mind.
‘There’s no hurry, is there?’
She gazes at me speculatively.
‘What’s the matter, Harold? You look strange.’
‘Touch of flu.’
‘You look like someone has banged you on the head with that enormous pot you’re making.’
I’ve never heard any attempt at humour from her before – probably too busy feeding the peacocks on the south lawn and talking to her gamekeeper. I can just see her ambling with him across her vast estate. I walk to the workshop, white and drowsy with its powdery light, and get back to my moon jar. I take off the wet sheet covering it and start.
It’s nice to be away from myself for a while. Pottery can do that to you. Suddenly the life you’re living could be happening to someone else. All the mistakes, all the worries, all the despairs become attendant nymphs. They don’t go away, they hang around, but they do stop ploughing your insides.
Solitude was my thing, wasn’t it? I had my room in Seoul. I had people around me, of course, but they didn’t impair me. I functioned. Now I can barely do so. I don’t know how I’d manage without the moon jar. How can another human being be so necessary? For your breath? For the minutes dragging past with their leaden seconds until her return? I need information about Marylou, as if I were some kind of reporter dedicated to the one subject. I need to know how she’s slept, what she’s reading. I remember how her hands just lie there forgotten when she speaks. They never touch her hair either, which runs long and sleek, tame and silky down her spine. I’ve never known a woman to ignore her hair in such a way. Her long fingers seem to sleep in her lap, apparently useless, but deft as soon as they spring into action. And of course I need to see her in the morning, emerging from sleep, returning to the world, and to me. But I must get rid of these thoughts.
I feel the pot under my fingers and it warns me to be careful, to stay on my tightrope, not to fall, because there’s no net.
I work and work. I don’t finish that half of the jar that day, but I do get rid of the day.
Then I walk back to The Sea & Us. The air is balmy, with the softness of very new summer. It’s so late the shop is closed and I climb up the stairs, but Verity calls me halfway up.
‘Harold, can you come?’
I walk down. She’s going to offer me dinner. I shouldn’t accept, I’ve already accepted three times…
She’s standing by her door. I can see the room behind her. Ben is sitting at her table. Now is the time of my ordeal. I’ve got to walk through this and accept it. I just hope Marylou isn’t there, that they don’t tell me their good news together. After this, I’ll go away. I’ll go to the Czech Republic. I should have gone long ago. I’ll see that cathedral, that river, Sudek’s wilted flower …
Verity ushers me forward. Ben’s alone. I can’t fathom his expression, everything is a bit too hazy. I can hardly make out his features. I lower myself to sit in front of him. He’ll make her happy, he’ll make her laugh, he can take her into the future, he can take her away from her past – away from me. I force myself to smile.
‘Hi, Ben.’
He looks at me searchingly.
‘Harold, Verity tells me Marylou hasn’t come back.’
‘No, no.’
But he knows that surely?
Verity lays her palm on my forearm. It feels like a duck’s webbed foot is treading on me.
‘Harold, he saw her for an hour three days ago.’
They’re both peering at me. I clock their serious expressions.
‘You don’t know where she is?’
Ben’s honest, open face tells me that this is the truth.
‘I’m sorry, mate. We just had a coffee and she went off. She suddenly seemed in a hurry.’
Verity gets up, turning up her sleeves in a timeless gesture.
‘We’ve got to find her. She can’t have returned to … Can she?’
I look at her as it dawns on me. Ben interrupts.
‘Where would she have got to? Not …?’
Verity frowns.
‘Surely not …’
And then I know and I don’t know. I’m certain and I’m not. But the idea occurs to me. They see it in my face.
Ben’s the first to put our doubts into words.
‘What she told us about herself – it was true, wasn’t it?’
Verity mumbles. ‘You know it was.’
In quiet acknowledgement, Ben crosses his arms on the table and lowers his head, before muttering, ‘But where would she work here?’
I stare at Verity.
‘We’ll have to find out.’
21
Over and Out
I’VE NEVER VISITED a brothel before. I discover they’re all different, yet all the same. Vast sofas, generally round, subdued, garish lights, reds, violets and sudden creams, bursts of yellow, lots of silk and a muted feeling, as if all sound were stocked up somewhere else. A conservative-looking woman always welcomes you, in a friendly, smooth way. Everything is made easy. The physical descriptions of the women are on the net. That’s Verity’s job. She rules out those who don’t fit.
Then I turn up and ask for the girl. They assume I prefer Asians.
In a week I’ve been to dozens of brothels in Melbourne. The last one on our list, the most luxurious, has a Korean girl with very long hair. I wait in a small boudoir. The room is decorated in shades of caramel, with caramel twirls of silk above the sofa, giving onto a bedroom with an enormous round caramel bed and more caramel silk hanging above it in a kind of tighter sacrificial twist – obviously a theme – which says more about the decorator than about anybody else.
The description was close. It could be the right place, I repeat to myself. I’m so hopeful that I can’t stay seated. I walk around to keep calm. Then the door opens and she walks in, and in daze, for a second, I think it’s Marylou, my old lady, my old chum.
She’s slim, long-haired, Korean, just like they said. I gape as the girl treads towards me on the thick carpet. Only it isn’t her. I raise an arm, as if to ward her off, but then bring it down to shake her hand, as I’ve done with all the others. She has a sweet expression on her face. She understands. She knows I’m looking for someone as they all did nearly immediately.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says softly. ‘Better luck next time.’
Encouraged, I ask her, as I’ve asked all the others, if she knows anyone of this description. She shakes her head.
‘Not anyone that beautiful.’
I give her more details.
‘She speaks like a Spitfire pilot.’
‘Spitfire pilot?’
I shake her hand again and thank her. The woman at the desk calls out but I’m gone. I’ve already paid. There are no more brothels left in Melbourne.
I have no idea how I return to The Sea & Us, or which tram takes me, but I arrive there somehow.
I walk straight to Verity’s door and knock. I shake my head at her mute question. We’ve now done all we can think of. It’s over.
22
Night
VERITY GIVES ME a neat whiskey. We’re standing at the bottom of the stairs. A mental fog is creeping over me, a coat of despair in which I’ll probably huddle to get to sleep.
‘Harold, have we thought of everything?’
‘Well, what else do you want us to think of ? You don’t think she went back to Seoul to get beaten up again, do you? We’ve ruled that one out, haven’t we? Haven’t we?
’
Verity’s eyes tighten.
‘Why not?’
Something in me stops in its tracks again. I wander into her place without realising it and sit down at her kitchen table. She pulls out the chair opposite me and leans in on her elbows.
‘Marylou’s twenty-four. She told me. Do you know how long she’s been doing this?’
I frown.
‘I’ve known her for three years. From what she let slip, I think that when I moved onto the street she’d been there for a year.’
Verity squeezes her elbows.
‘Has she got any family?’
‘A grandfather. He’s a kind of street person, peddling small looking glasses from a cart. He was always around, dressed in dignified rags. I love the guy. It was only when Marylou told me her Korean name the other day that I realised he was her grandfather. He’s doesn’t want her to know about him. If she did, he’d probably do away with himself. He was clearly keeping an eye on her from a discreet distance. I’ve written to the caretaker of the building where I used to live, asking him to give a note to a soup vendor, who can pass it on to Sung-ki. But a fat lot of reassurance that’ll be for him if she’s disappeared again.’
‘Is there no other family?’
‘I think she has a mother in Los Angeles. And a stepfather.’
‘Are they in touch?’
‘Verity. She was raped at seven or eight years of age by her stepbrother.’
‘I suspected something of that nature.’
Her voice is terse. We’re moving our thoughts around like pieces on a chessboard.
‘Harold, when something like that happens to you, you have to finish with it. Walk through it all over again, face each part of it, a bit like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime. Only it’s the other way round. You revisit as an adult what was done to you as a child. You have to … to sort yourself out … to see it all properly. My husband took everything out on others. Marylou is taking it out on herself.’
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