Inconsolable

by Ainslie Paton

  She picked up a photo of Hugh and Roger at a ribbon cutting with the prime minister, turned it face down and fled to the tune of Hugh’s, “Hey, put that back.”

  She smiled all the way to her desk. Orange juice was best served fresh-squeezed and chilled. It was time to put the squeeze on Drum and the chill on her feelings about Gabriella. Meanwhile there was a visit to Cooper Park on her agenda.

  She grabbed the oranges, her bag and car keys and headed out. At the park she went to the rotunda where Enid, the resident bag lady, was usually found. Enid and her supermarket trolley were home and delighted with the oranges. She said she’d share them around with the others who slept rough in summer.

  Foley got back in her car and drove home. She was going to the cliff and waiting for Drum if it took all night. But first she needed a change of clothes.

  She could hear the TV before she got in the front door. Nat was home, standing in front of the screen, the remote in her hand, flicking between one network news program and another.

  “Hey.” Nat’s attention didn’t leave TV.

  “Hey yourself.” Foley looked at the screen, looked at Nat. The buttons of her shirt were done up crookedly. It was more than likely she’d looked like that since she got dressed this morning. “Interesting day?”

  “Slow news day. Didn’t leave the office.”

  “Your colleagues hate you, don’t they?”

  That got Nat’s attention. A quick head turn. “Why would you say that?”

  Foley grinned. “No reason?” She went to the kitchen and rummaged in the fridge for a snack.

  Nat abandoned the TV and followed. “Why would you say that? What’ve you heard?”

  Foley laughed. Nat and instant paranoia were like ice and cold, inseparable. “Nothing. You’re the one who hears things, not me.”

  Nat leaned against the pantry cupboard. She wore only one hoop earring. “You make it sound like I’m a spirit medium.”

  This was the third or fourth day Nat only had the one earring on. Foley wondered how long it would take her to notice or someone else to mention it to her. “You hear things.”

  “Are you trying to remind me what I hear from you has to stay off the record?”

  Foley picked at leftover Thai beef salad. “No. Do I need to?”

  “No. But I got an invitation today.”

  She said, “Sculpture on the Coast launch party,” with a mouthful of cold beef.

  “Right. Is there anything I should know about that?”

  Foley shrugged. “Free wine and cheese.”

  Nat gave her the look. The look that said, even though I appear to be a person who is so absent-minded I can barely dress myself, I have a steel trap mind. It was an effective look for someone who once wore two entirely different shoes, a heel and a flattie, to work and didn’t notice until someone asked why she was limping.

  Foley shook her head. She ate more of the beef and a spicy, soggy tomato.

  Nat prodded. “Off the record.”

  “Off the record, I have nothing to tell you except that I’m going to catch Drum at home tonight if I have to stay in that damn cave till the sun comes up. He delivered the bag of oranges back to the office this morning.”

  She stopped herself mentioning the note on the flyleaf of the Anthony Burgess novel. The less colour she gave Nat the easier it was to keep her interest at arms-length. But she’d been best mates with Nat since high school, it was impossible not to share. And as with Hugh, they knew where the lines needed to be drawn to keep their personal and professional lives separate. Not that those lines were always shiny bright clear because council always featured in local news stories. The one good thing about not being in Gabriella’s role was that Foley didn’t manage media relations so she didn’t have to brief Nat or keep information from her in any strictly official capacity.

  Nat tucked a wayward piece of hair behind her earring-free ear. How could she not know? “I knew I liked him. He’d be a great interview. You said he was articulate. It’d be a terrific profile.” She made quote mark fingers. “‘The homeless man with the best views in Sydney’.”

  Foley stabbed her fork towards Nat, then threw it in the sink. “No.”

  “But I could’ve easily found out about him from another source.”

  “But you didn’t. He’s been there for over a year and you didn’t know about him till I told you, so you can’t use him unless another source does show up.” And she’d make sure that didn’t happen by getting Drum to move out of the cave and ensuring Geraldo had no complaints to make.

  But it didn’t hurt to hedge her bets. “Anyway, it’s hardly ethical. He might be fragile; he has to be damaged in some way. The kind of attention you could bring might be bad for him.”

  Nat took the near empty container of Thai beef out of her hands and fished in the drawer for another fork. “He’s so damaged you’re going to go wait for him on the side of a cliff in the middle of the night. You do know how stupid that sounds?”

  “I don’t think he’s dangerous, I think he’s clever and he’s been dodging me all week. If I want to catch him I have to play him at his own game. I’m taking my phone and my pepper spray and I’ll text you if I think I’m in any trouble.”

  “That’ll be easy to do when he’s chucking you into the sea. And what if I don’t hear from you? I’m supposed to do what?”

  “Go to bed.”

  Nat dumped the empty container in the kitchen bin and her fork in the sink. “Does Hugh know you’re doing this?”

  “He knows I’m handling it.”

  “Which means he doesn’t know you’re going to sit in the dark on a cliff top waiting for a homeless man who might be any kind of unstable. Foley, there’s dumb and there’s you making a decision worse than your tattoo.”

  Foley grunted in annoyance. She couldn’t argue the tattoo. “He’s not going to hurt me.”

  “Because he helped some people who got stung and that makes him some kind of street person vigilante saint?”

  “You’re the only one who’d call him that. He’s not dangerous.”

  “And you’d know this exactly how?”

  There was no exactly about it and Nat was right to be pointing out that this probably wasn’t the safest approach, but Foley felt it to her core that Drum wasn’t volatile and wouldn’t do her any harm.

  “At least I can dress myself properly.”

  Nat squinted at her through glasses that had finger smudge marks all over them. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  Foley moved passed her to go get changed into her rock climbing and waiting around clothes and heard Nat’s annoyed, “Oh far out. I’ve been walking around all day with my zipper undone.”

  6: Deal

  Drum stepped across the rock ledge and a bright light hit him fair in the face. He blinked and turned his head to avoid it and braced for trouble. The beam lowered and he heard feet moving, but only one pair.

  “Drum, it’s Foley.”

  It was after 2am according to the clock on the amenities block wall, but it often ran slow, what the hell was she doing here? He could see her now, standing on the wide flat part of the ledge where his outdoor setting normally was. It was in pieces. He went through to the cave and even without decent light he could see it’d been trashed, his folding bed broken in half, his sleeping bag torn to ribbons. Seems expense accounts ran to ransacking these days.

  He turned back towards Foley. She had her phone in her hand, a torch app on it held down towards their feet. If she was about to call reinforcements, he’d do what he could to outrun them.

  “I was so worried about you,” she said.

  He crossed his arms and shifted his weight onto one leg. Because she was mostly in shadow it was easier to look at her. She wasn’t so shiny clean, especially since she’d brought lies with her.

  “I didn’t know if you’d been hurt, if there’d been a fight. What happened?”

  She shuffled about anxiously, not making any move to us
e the phone. And she clearly didn’t do this, so that meant sometime today when he’d been out, Jonesy came for payback. Either that or it was unconnected, coincidental.

  “How long have you been here?” he said.

  “I came around nine. This … this … You didn’t know.”

  Five hours. She’d waited five hours for him. “You can’t be here.” It wasn’t safe for her. Drum had no idea if this was the end of one bad thing, or the beginning of another. But he needed her gone, now and forever.

  “I came to talk to you about the oranges and about … but this is awful. I’m so sorry.”

  “I don’t want you here. You need to go.”

  “I can—”

  He raised his voice. “Nothing. You can nothing. Go. Now.”

  “Drum, no, you think council did this? No, no, no. It was like this when I got here.”

  She could think what she wanted so long as she left. He turned away from her to assess the damage.

  “Please, you have to understand this wasn’t us.”

  There was something about her voice that made him turn back to her. She didn’t sound so sure. “What do you know about this?”

  “Nothing. Like I said, it was like this when I got here. I didn’t know if you’d ever come back.”

  “I live here,” he said flatly.

  “But you’ve been staying away and when I saw this I thought maybe you—”

  He sighed, exasperated. “Just go. You don’t belong here.”

  “Okay. I’m really sorry. If there’s—”

  “There’s not.”

  “How will you manage?”

  “That’s not your problem.”

  “Yes. It is my problem. Has anything like this happened before?”

  He pitched his voice low and hard. “Get off my rock.”

  The air came out of her in a sharp draught. He’d frightened her. Now maybe she’d leave him alone. But she stood there, looking at him, and because it was difficult to make out her features he stared back.

  “I need to tell you why I’m especially worried about you,” she said.

  Stubborn, stupid woman. “I’m not interested in anything you have to say.”

  She stepped towards him, bringing the pool of light with her. “You can’t stay here tonight. They might come back.”

  He stepped back and noticed his tarp had been ripped too. Under his foot was the flattened, torn cover of a book. “Which is why you need to go now.”

  “I’m not going unless you are. I can take you to a shelter tonight. You can come back when it’s light.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  The light shut off. She walked past him into the cave. “Then do you mind if I sit on what’s left of your sleeping bag? I think my butt has deflated. I’ve been sitting on that rock for hours.” She stopped in the act of picking the bag up. “Unless you want to use it?”

  He’d touched her before he realised it. He wanted her to stop, to go. He retracted his fingers almost as quickly as he made contact with the back of her arm, but it was long enough to realise she was cold and for his anger to cool, like her body temperature.

  “You have no sense, woman.”

  She bundled the torn-up bag in her arms and turned to face him. She was way too close and moonlight caught her face. He saw an ocean of feeling there and he had to look away.

  “If they come again we can sneak out your back way.”

  He grunted an acknowledgement. There wasn’t much of a reason for anyone to come back. Whoever did this had their fun, had their laugh, knowing they’d left him with nothing worth anything.

  “They won’t come back. There’s no reason for you to stay.”

  She huffed. “A moment ago you were trying to get me to leave because you thought they would.”

  “A moment ago, I found out my home had been ransacked and I wasn’t sure it wasn’t your latest tactic to get me to move out.”

  She nodded. “Fair enough.” She spread the bag at the mouth of the cave, folding it so it made a blanket of sorts to sit on, then sat with a grunt and stretched her legs out in front of her, facing the ocean. It was a lovely clear night, but it would get much cooler. And he still needed to talk her into leaving.

  He walked around the cave. His books had been torn apart. Had there been any wind, there could be pages of prose all over the beach and up and down the coast by now. His mug and plate were broken. There was no sign of his cooktop, though the gas bottle was still there. His esky and suitcase were missing. There was a scattering of clothing: a t-shirt, a pair of boardies, a hoodie. He picked the hoodie up and sniffed it. It smelled like the sea. It would have to do.

  “Here, put this on.” He held it out to her.

  “I’m fine.”

  Because he was close to her, he noticed her smile. “You’re cold and it will get colder.”

  “We could both be warmer if we went somewhere else.”

  “I’m not leaving. This is where I live. This is where I want to be.”

  “Even when someone has mucked it all up for you?”

  “They’re just things. They’re not important. I can replace then.”

  “How will you replace them? Do you have a job?”

  He dropped the hoodie beside her and went back into the cave and started picking up the loose pages. “I do odd jobs for enough money to buy what I need.”

  “And you have your welfare payment.”

  “I don’t claim welfare.”

  He heard the rustle of the sleeping bag. “Why not?”

  He stood straight, a pile of paper in his hands, his back to her. “Because I’m perfectly capable of earning a living.”

  She sighed. “So why do you live here?”

  “Why don’t you go back into your neat little world where things behave the way you want them to?”

  Her white teeth flashed. “Nice try.”

  He went back to cleaning up. If he stopped engaging with her she might get bored and leave.

  “It is really beautiful here at night. So different to the day. The stars are so, so, there, just hanging there as if you could pluck them up and put them in your pocket, and it’s so quiet, no traffic noises.”

  Next thing she’d be trying to tell him she understood why he lived here. It was all persuasion with her, the coffee, the breakfasts, the oranges. But worse, worse was the conversation, the sense of her mind turning over, trying to understand. That’s what he hated most of all.

  “Don’t bring things to me. I don’t want your gifts, your bribery.”

  “Okay. Sorry.”

  What, that was it? No argument? “I’ll return anything you bring me. I don’t want your help.”

  “Okay. I get it. I took the oranges to Cooper Park like you suggested today.”

  He shook his head and stuffed the loose pages under one of the metal legs of the outdoor setting, he folded up the torn tarp and weighted it down as well. And then there was nothing left to do.

  “Foley, go home.” She had his hoodie on. It hung off her shoulders and over her hands.

  She rolled back the sleeves. “We need to talk, Drum.”

  No, that’s not what he needed. More of her words, more of her world poured in his ear. He’d given that away and she made him remember too much, phone apps and coffee shop coffee, women with shiny hair and glossy ways. He stood behind her so he wasn’t tempted to look at her face. It was 2am, this was ridiculous.

  “There’s going to be a big event. The world’s biggest outdoor sculpture exhibition. There’ll be sculpture placed all along the coastal walkway and in Marks Park above us here. More than a hundred different works. Thousands of people are going to be walking all around here for two weeks. Families, little kids, tourists. Lots of media and cameras. It’s too risky for you to be here when that’s happening.”

  “That has nothing to do with me.”

  “With so many extra people around, it will be hard for you to come and go without being seen. And the more people who see you, the more
at risk you are of being attacked or having your stuff stolen or smashed again.”

  “I don’t care about that. I can protect myself.”

  “But you can’t protect other people.”

  He’d tried, he’d tried his hardest once he’d understood the damage he’d done, but it was true, he couldn’t protect people. He only pretended he could, like with the family on the beach, like with Jonesy, Robbo and the kid.

  “What if someone came down here and fell, Drum? What if it was kids? I know you wouldn’t like that.”

  All he could do was hurt people. “I’ll go.”

  She stood up so quickly he staggered back. Her hand came out and wrapped around his forearm. “Thank you.”

  He pulled away. “Don’t touch me.”

  Both of her hands came up, flattened, surrendering. “I’m sorry.”

  He backed away from her. “You’ve got what you want, now go.”

  “Will you sleep, what will you do?”

  He shook his head. He didn’t want to talk to her anymore.

  “Drum, where will you go?”

  “When does it start?”

  She gave him the dates. Five days time for two weeks absence.

  “Then that’s when I’ll go, right before it starts.”

  She shook her head. “You can’t stay here now.”

  “I’m not leaving till I have to. I’ll be back when it’s over. That’s the best I can give you. I can’t be away from here.”

  “Okay.” She sighed. “That’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing.”

  He nodded. “Now go.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  She was relentless. She would anyway. He sighed.

  “The sunrise must be wonderful. I, ah, since I’m here, I wondered if you’d mind me staying to watch it?”

  “You want to watch the sun rise here, with me?”

  She nodded, white smile in the gloom. It was just a sunrise. She was just a woman.

  “The sun rises all over the place at the same time. There are plenty of other places you can watch it.”

  “I know, but I’m getting attached to your cave and I can’t take your hoodie with me and you’re right, I’ll get cold.”