by Iain Ryan
Maybe she did?
Jenny was always cagey about boys.
Anita Milburn was next. Or I should say her boyfriend, Dylan Copson, was next. That was nothing. At the time, Dylan was a twenty-four-year-old postgraduate student, building up to a PhD bid with research assistant work. We did one contract together. One contract. It was a three-week job and for the last fortnight of it we fooled around. When the job was finished, Dylan turned in his report and I read it in my underwear in his bed.
It wasn’t bad.
And that was Dylan in a nutshell: not bad.
But obviously not good either. He was stringing Anita along, not that I knew it at the time. That red hair of hers was everywhere in the apartment.
I just never asked.
I didn’t really care.
Anita wasn’t my student.
When Dylan was done fucking me on the side, he moved on to Jenny. There she is again, I suppose. It’s weird, I can remember her telling me she liked him. In a way, I totally gave her her moment.
The rain falls hard and thick and I start to worry about hail. I wipe at the inside of the windscreen, searching the landscape for something to park my car under.
The lot is open.
There’s nothing.
I thought they—
And then there’s David Brier. I think David also got over on his physical similarity to Louis, the one who left me for the senior lecturer in Chicago who is now a professor. I’m the secondary supervisor on his thesis. Or was. Who knows? I quite like David but our time together was super brief. Four one-nighters, spread months apart.
That’s it.
Of all these men, he’s the only one I feel a twinge of something over. Not affection. It’s not guilt. But whatever it is – proprietary, maybe? – I try to keep a purposeful social distance from him these days. It’s nonsense, in a way. Overprotective on my part because David Brier can handle himself. He’s painfully smart. And he’s a Deleuze reader. Fucking his secondary supervisor a couple of times, it isn’t nearly the dumbest thing he’ll do in his academic career.
The rain blasts down and there’s some new perspective in all this brooding. I suddenly sense Jenny’s presence more keenly. She knew these men. She slept with Dylan, maybe slept with Ryan. She was on and off with David, like myself. That’s student life, all over. If the postgrads didn’t sleep with one another, none of them would ever get laid. None of them. But I don’t like the triangulations forming. Jenny and I seem a bit joined at the hip. Stick sisters, through and through. And yet I was working with her, putting a lot of trust in her. Depending on this psycho for things I really needed. It seems kind of crazy now.
I thought—
I crawl into the back seat and lie down.
I flip the bird at the car ceiling and say, ‘Fire this, bitch.’
I shut my eyes.
Maybe they should have fired me?
Oh god.
I haven’t slept in a day or two.
Did I mention that?
SERO
6
You stagger out of the forest, covered in blood and dirt. You come across a wide lake of turquoise water. You scan the lake and see a house on the opposing shore. A small stone cottage.
7
There’s a dead horse behind the stone cottage. Inside the house you find a thin man in battle armour tending to a fireplace. He kneels before the flames, eyes averted. You step in behind him.
‘I have no gold and no food,’ he says without turning. ‘So be on your way, traveller.’
‘What is this place?’
‘None of your concern. I’m to start this fire or we’ll both find ourselves at the end of a rope tonight.’
‘I think not.’
The man sighs. ‘The man coming this way has killed a dozen of your kind.’
‘My kind? I’m unknown even to myself.’
‘You have no name?’
‘None that I can remember. I woke in a cave, in the forest.’
‘You should go back there. Now, I best be—’
You draw your sword.
‘Oh, I see,’ and the man turns to you at last. In the firelight, his face appears ruined, a mess of open scars and wet blisters. ‘Go on then,’ he says. He unstraps his chest plate and it drops to the floor. ‘You’d only be doing that which I haven’t the courage for.’
‘So be it.’
The man collapses fast when struck. For reasons unknown, you help him to the ground. Huffing his last breaths, the man smiles and tells you it’s a pity not to see his masters die tonight.
8
The night is clear. Dressed in the dead man’s clothes, you stand by the house and watch a party of riders approach. There are five of them. Two strong guards with armour catching the moonlight. Three without. Noblemen.
You return to the house and wait.
They arrive and tie their horses. One of them yells, ‘Tyson? Where are you, goddamnit?’
The door slams open and one of the guards comes in alone. You step out from the shadows and slip an arm around his throat. He struggles terribly, his armour creaking and grinding against you. When it’s done, you search his body and find a knife.
You leave through a rear door and circle the cottage. As you appear from the side of the house, you howl like a demon and throw the knife into one of the noblemen before plunging your sword into another. Blood splatters across your face and it feels like rain after years of drought.
9
You have a horse now. And you have gold. More gold. The noblemen were carrying bags of the stuff. You also have a week’s supply of food and a range of weapons. The men carried daggers, maces, axes and swords. You look through the swords and test them but none of them feel right. You keep the strange blade you took from the orcs. There is one final item, though. The party of noblemen carried a hessian bag of severed hands. Trophies. You spread the hands out on the ground.
Fourteen men.
Five women.
This means nothing to you but a cold sensation washes through your body. You stare at your own hands, then you gather up the body parts and place them back in the bag as a harsh storm blows in, extinguishing the pyre.
ERMA
I come to gasping for air in the back seat of my car.
Night outside.
I’ve been asleep for hours in the UQ car park.
I get out and stretch my legs on the wet bitumen. Nearby, a street gutter roars with current. Drizzling rain falls through the street light.
Part of the barbarian dream still floats around in my head. I want to grasp hold of it – the man with the damaged face, the hands in a bag – but as I search the details, they seem to evaporate. What is this? Sero is Archibald Moder’s creation. The character has been in my head since I was a teenager, but not like this. The dreams are a persistent thing now, post-Jenny.
I turn my face skyward and let the misting rain wet my skin, trying to wake up. Standing there in the dark empty car park, I feel strangely revitalised.
A weird idea arrives:
Reschedule with Moder.
Tell him what happened.
I have his number. It’s in Jenny’s paperwork. I could call him.
Why haven’t you done this?
Reschedule the interview and you don’t need Jenny’s dictaphone.
Hedge a bet each way.
If I call Moder’s people and tell them the whole story, he might bite, because he’s a writer. Whatever his proclivities towards seclusion and privacy, the story of the dead girl he just met might pique his interest. Death and violence are always a great pitch.
Breakfast is a toasted sandwich at an espresso bar Jenny favoured, a hole in the wall down on James Street. It’s on my timeline. Sitting on a milk crate in the winter breeze, I run my list from the other day:
1.Find the Dictaphone.
—Call the cops.
—Find the car.
2.Reschedule Moder.
I make the calls first but get no answer
from the detectives in charge of Jenny’s case or from Moder’s people. I leave messages with both. Then I chart a course for the day, pen in hand, street directory at my feet. My next tasks – find the dictaphone, find Jenny’s car – they’re spatial now. Lost coordinates on a plane. Certeau said that we make and remake the city by walking through it, embodying it as if we’re blood flowing through veins. Today, I’m Jenny’s blood.
From my timeline, I know that Jenny goes dark in mid- to late June. Leading up to that I’ve got receipts and research notes that show her drinking eleven thirty double-shots here at Jamie’s Espresso, eating late-afternoon burritos at Tuckeria on Brunswick Street and all-day breakfasts at Cirque. Some days she’s working across the river in West End and over there it’s coffee at The Gun Shop, yiros at The Little Greek, cocktails at the Lychee Lounge. She’s a creature of habit. The same cafes and pubs depending on what side of town she’s working.
My thinking is, she lost the dictaphone. Misplaced it. That’s why she was stalling. That’s the theory. The last interviews look like they happened. I have her schedule and the receipts. I can see her getting out there, doing them. The only interview I can’t see concrete proof of is the one with Archibald Moder. All I have is the prelim paperwork on that. I don’t have fuel receipts for driving out to his place up on Tambourine Mountain or food-stops dotting the journey but I’m still holding out hope. That interview was booked and arranged. All she needed to do was turn up with the dictaphone and the survey questions. Who knows? Maybe she didn’t need food or fuel that day?
What I need to do now is a little fieldwork. I need to shake something loose. I’m going to visit all the places on her timeline and see what happens. This is the nature of all field research. New knowledge comes to those who show up.
Walking to the cash register, I notice a lull in the morning foot traffic. I order another flat white at the counter and, like some police detective in a movie, I hand over a picture of Jenny while they’re making it. I found this picture tucked into one of her textbooks. It’s the smiling Jenny, taken in New Farm park, rose bushes in the background. This is the living person. The young woman I knew. I’ve found I can’t look at it for too long, not this particular photo.
‘Do you remember this girl?’
The blonde woman on the register has better things to do. She glances at the photo and passes it to the man working the coffee machine. He shakes his head and hands the photo back.
‘She was a regular,’ says the man. ‘Not in a while, though.’
‘This girl had something of mine. A dictaphone. It’s silver, the size of a mobile phone. Do you have somewhere you put stuff that’s been left here?’
‘When did she leave it?’ says the man.
‘A year ago.’
‘It’d be long gone if it was ever here,’ he says and puts my coffee up on the counter.
I receive a similar story from a dozen other cafes, pubs and bars. The Brunswick Hotel lets me sort through their disgusting bucket of lost things. It’s all in there: Zippo lighters covered in grease, frayed paperback novels, a framed diploma, old packs of gum. But no dictaphones. I repeat the procedure down the road. I’m friendly with the manager of the Alibi Room and he has a garbage bag in the corner of his office filled with lost property. No dice there either. Around the corner, I hit the Little Larder first and, big surprise, I find nothing. It’s an upmarket place (lots of lost makeup cases and fancy pens) but it’s a dead end. I press on and sort through a plastic bin at the Moray Street Cafe and a cardboard box full of cheap sunglasses and children’s toys at the New Farm Deli. Across the river at The Gun Shop, Atomica and a few bars doing a lunch trade, I find piles of library books, busted headphones, socks, video cards, disposable cameras and one hundred black umbrellas.
As the day wears on, I feel as though I’m living in some parallel universe, some other branch of the narrative. Every bit of this crap left behind is a totem of what might have been. Every lone glove, every set of keys, every piece of jewellery, they all represent possibilities foregone. These were choices people made, unwittingly or otherwise. It reminds me of the items discarded by characters in gamebooks. Your pack is heavy, you need to dump something. Make the appropriate adjustments to your Equipment List. These cafe back rooms with their sad little hidey-holes are branches of a story that could have happened, but no one chose them. If you have the busted headphones, turn to sixty-five.
Handling this stuff gives me bad ideas. If Jenny had kept a hold of her fucking dictaphone, would she still be alive today? I try to stop myself but it’s hard not to wonder if there’s an alternate timeline out there where something this small saved both of us? It seems insane to marry events like I am but I can’t stop. There’s always a sequence to things. Connections to be made. Always. That’s why I make timelines, because time connects things. Over time, a small thing can lead to a big thing. A small thing can kill you. Given enough time, anything can happen. All sparks become an explosion.
The wrong kiss.
The cell dividing.
One more drink for the road.
Every horrible outcome, all from a seed.
Is the dictaphone Jenny’s seed?
Or is it my seed?
Stop.
St—
But I can’t stop today.
Did I bully a young woman onto the path that led to her death? I did, in some capacity, didn’t I? But did I do it in other ways too, ways I’m yet to grasp hold of? Did I unwittingly push the wrong person towards darkness and chaos? Did I invite carnage into my own house? Did I do all this for a dictaphone left on a cafe bench, swept into a back room and dumped in the trash?
What am I really researching here?
The last cafe manager looks at my blank face and says, ‘Is it in there?’ He checks his watch. We’re standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a janitor’s closet off an alleyway.
I snap out of my daze.
‘No.’
Then I tell him he should throw all this shit in the bin.
Jenny’s sister, Gloria Wasserman, rents a house on high stilts on Harcourt Street. That’s my neighbourhood, it’s a half-hour walk from my apartment. Gloria can fill in gaps for me, she may have what I need, but she’s not answering the only number I have for her. And no one’s answering her door tonight either. The place is closed up tight. I watch from a secluded spot across the street.
A van pulls up.
A woman gets out, straightens a black-and-white tube dress – despite the cold – and starts walking back towards Brunswick Street. I watch her plump arse moving as she walks away. Despite the soaring property prices, the backstreets of New Farm still harbour plenty of street prostitution. It’s a messed-up suburb. The million-dollar mansions and sports cars soak up the limelight but in the cracks remain the artists, junkies and hookers of old. It all coexists in some liminal zone between past and present.
My phone vibrates in my pocket.
An unlisted number.
‘Hello?’
‘Who’s this?’ A woman’s voice.
‘Erma Bridges. Who’s this?’
‘Detective Senior Constable Edwina Packard. I’m returning your call from this morning. Remember me?’
I only have half-formed memories of the police detectives visiting me in the hospital. One of them was an older man, a stockier version of my grandfather in a steel-grey suit. Didn’t say much. But the other one was a woman not much older than myself. They were a strange pair. I can vaguely remember the woman turning to the older detective and seeing her ash-blonde hair tucked up in an elaborate bun.
And that’s it.
My whole fortnight of bedrest contains about eight hours of crisp memories. I don’t know whether it was the shock or the meds but there’s not much there. It may well be that I don’t want to remember. Tonight, I don’t recognise Detective Edwina Packard’s face. Only the blonde bun. I’m standing in the interior glare of a Subway restaurant in the bowels of the Myer Centre, looking from customer to cust
omer, when I see the back of her head.
‘Detective?’
She glances up, her mouth wrapped around a meatball sub. She coughs, lays the sub down and nods at the empty seat across the table. ‘How you doing? You want anything? You can have my cookie.’
‘You know, I think I am going to get something. Is that weird?’
‘What?’
‘It just seems …’
Edwina reaches into the fob pocket of her pants. ‘Here, get me another Diet Coke.’
And so it is that the two of us sit there, eating our sandwiches, talking about the time my research assistant tried to kill me. Edwina launches in with, ‘I know it’s not what you want to hear but what happened to you is pretty much an open and shut thing. We spoke to everyone. Her parents, her family, her doctors. Your friend was crazy and on drugs. That’s the story we heard over and over. That’s it, really.’ Edwina shrugs. ‘People do crazy things when they’re high. She was probably trying to rob you. That’s all I can say about it.’
‘It’s not really why I called but … I thought she was eccentric. Everyone’s a bit that way where I work. I didn’t think Jenny was on drugs or manic or anything.’
‘She had a history. Maybe she had a good couple of years when you knew her. But let me tell you, the rest of it is pretty messy.’
‘Messy how?’
‘School complaints, in and out of different places, charges for theft, public nuisance, mostly small stuff, but there’s drug convictions and a restraining order in there as well. The family didn’t really know how to deal with her. Have you met them?’
‘Yeah, some of them. The sister.’
‘They’ve got money, right? They sent her to one shrink after another. In and out of rehab. They did the whole thing that rich people do when their kids screw up. They threw money at the problem.’
‘That’s really strange,’ I say. My parents didn’t do that.
Edwina licks one of her fingers. ‘How so?’
