by Iain Ryan
Growing up, we had a swimming pool in the serviced lawn behind our house. My parents heated it during the winter. We were that sort of family. Lived in a six-bedroom manse behind green hedges. A circular drive, marble floors, the whole bit. You’re not supposed to come from this sort of money in my profession. Cultural studies is academia for the working class. And yet I’m none of these things, not in my bones.
At least my parents didn’t inherit their wealth. Dad was a second-generation Brit and his family washed up in Melbourne with next to nothing. He put himself through business school and started his first management gig at twenty-three after a stint clerking somewhere. That first job was where he met my mother. Mum started out as a receptionist but retrained in accounting as soon as Dad got rolling. She owns a franchise of gift shops now.
I was born when my mother was twenty-seven. My sister is eleven months younger. Irish twins, as they say. Growing up it was clear to Dora and I that our parents made their money the hard way, that making it took time, and that this was how it was done. They would come and go from the house at all hours – Dad away for weeks at a time. What I now view as a type of neglect was just the ‘cost of doing business’. That’s ultimately what our family was. ‘We have to work together,’ my mother would say.
She doesn’t say it anymore.
I kind of blew that up.
The ground drops away on Annie Street and I go with it, running faster, leaning in. I cut across Clay and take Heal down to James Street, passing the last gasp of suburbia (the school, the butcher) and turning into the bottom of Harcourt. There’s a prostitute standing on the sidewalk and we nod at each other as I pass.
My sister had a car accident in August of ’99. She was driving someone across town in her cream BMW sedan, a birthday present from my dad. It was a bright day. Eleven o’clock. An old man with the sun in his eyes rammed into her driver’s side, pushing her car across an intersection and into a light pole.
Dora was pretty banged up. Broken arms and leg, whiplash, bedridden for weeks. I had to look after her. Dad was away. Mum was opening a new store. For weeks I did everything for Dora. I cleaned her, fed her, kept her company. Dora’s boyfriend Euan was around but he was hopeless. He spent his days ‘helping out’ as if on vacation. He lounged around the house watching TV, practising his golf swing (he played twice a week already, at twenty-five) and broke that up with beer and long swims in the family pool. He was supposed to be attending to the yard as well as Dora. That’s what my mother paid him for. He was the fucking gardening guy, originally. But he evolved into something else once he started dating my sister.
After three weeks with a bedridden Dora, I started to hate everyone. I had my own problems. I was already well and truly depressed when my sister had her accident. The shock of almost losing her piled on top of the toxic experience of having her around all the time, at her worst – it crushed me. She was horrible to everyone: a demanding, angry victim. It was the worst couple of months of my life.
One night, Dora’s sobbing echoed through the house and I officially gave up. She’d had some sort of fight with Euan – she was even more mean to him than me, I should add – and instead of going in to clean up the plate of half-finished food she’d hurled across the room, I tiptoed down to the kitchen and made my way to the pool. Under the lukewarm water, I let the real black tar feelings run their course. And then someone else slipped into the water.
I take a breather under a Frangipani tree across the street from Gloria’s house. The place is still closed up like before. I put my gloves on. They’re the only ones I have: two yellow and green dishwashing gloves.
I creep across the bitumen.
Around the house.
Through the rear laundry.
Into the garage.
Jenny’s car sits there under the tarpaulin. No headlights or wind now. I unwrap the crowbar and slide it into the seam of the driver’s side door. The first moment of metal touching metal squeaks loud. The neighbours can hear it, if they’re up. I figure my best bet is to go fast. I yank on the crowbar and the door pops.
You have two minutes.
The passenger seat is covered in clothes and plastic shopping bags filled with coffee cups and food wrappers. My hands dart across all of it, squeezing items, groping for the cold hard plastic of a dictaphone. I don’t find it. I scramble over into the back and pull down the bench seats and crawl halfway into the boot. It smells like mildew and sweat and I can’t see a thing but I claw at books, shoes, a rubber raincoat. From there, I check under all the seats and, with my eyes properly adjusted to the interior, I scan the centre console and dash. Nothing. I open the glovebox and pray for a miracle. In return, I get something so puzzling I almost yelp in fright as I draw it out.
A leather gun holster.
Inside the holster, a greasy dildo wrapped in a freezer bag.
What the hell?
I shove both in my pack and pad around in the glovebox, dragging out a tattered street directory. That goes in my pack as well. And then I’m out on James Street, jogging faster than I’d like. It’s two full blocks later before I remember the gloves. I’m still wearing them.
When I was ten, my mother developed a strange hobby: holding her breath underwater. It started with a documentary on Filipino free divers – she was importing something from the Philippines for the shop – and soon holding her breath became something she experimented with in the en suite bath, then the family pool. Everyone told her to stop doing it. But my mother never listens. I suppose we’re both a bit like that.
One day, Dad sends me downstairs to fetch Mum for dinner and there she is at the bottom of the pool, floating gently. As soon as I saw her, I knew she was in danger. Felt it. I lunged in and dragged her out. I pushed my breath into her lungs and screamed for help, pumped her chest. I was working on her with such determination that the ambulance officers had to prise me off her.
I wouldn’t let go.
I had to save her.
I did save her.
And the fortnight that followed was one of the brightest of my life. The rewards I received for saving my mother’s life – attention from my father, a write-up in the local paper, a little award from the Victorian Ambulance Service – and the pride I felt, it was so good and pure.
I was a hero.
I’m ashamed to admit how little of my adult life has married up to that moment. Years later, I wonder if that heroic impulse truly resides within me – deep, deep down – or if I was just a dumb kid who did what any other dumb kid would have done in that situation? It was my mother. Dying. That’s biology, right?
Jenny’s stuff bounces around in my pack as I run the path along the Brisbane River to Moray Street. I don’t know why I’m here, searching for breath with this fucked-up inventory:
Crowbar.
Bath towel.
Street directory.
Dildo.
Gun holster.
But it reminds me of that thing with my mum and the house and my sister. I’m stretched. I’m acting like that again. Angry. Impulsive. Diving in.
By morning, my kitchen timeline of Jenny’s last days has new notches on it. The weirder items I stole from her car don’t tell me a lot. The dildo is iridescent purple and bigger than anything I’d ever want inside me but nothing else about it is remarkable. There’s no clue in it. The leather gun holster isn’t much better. It tells me two things: one, the gun may have belonged to someone called Simon because that name is written in marker on the side of the thing, and two, the police haven’t searched Jenny’s car. I figure they’d be interested in the holster.
What is useful is Jenny’s street directory. It’s marked up with all sorts of annotations, most of them matching up to dates and meetings on my timeline. Yet there’s one page and one address that doesn’t appear anywhere else. It’s a page showing the backstreets of Kelvin Grove. The directory falls open to it, like Jenny used the page all the time, and there’s a Post-it note affixed:
CRAIG
10 Woolcock Street
I don’t know a Craig.
There’s no Craig on the timeline.
I put in an early-morning appearance at the Centre because I want to feel like a person who goes to work every day. I sit in my office. Drink coffee. Delete emails. I call the other missing interview respondents Jenny lost to the void. They all tell a similar story: she was nice, she asked me questions about my collection of gamebooks, she stopped by and talked about my writing. No one remembers anything except for how she looked and roughly when she arrived. It’s a relief in a way. No one spotted a drug addict or a crazy person. I wasn’t a complete fool, it seems. When I’m done, I follow up with Archibald Moder. No one picks up, but when his answering machine clicks in, I repeat my story: the girl who interviewed you last winter passed away violently and I’d like to speak with you regarding this matter. Another lie. I don’t want to talk to anyone about Jenny. But sometimes a lie is the thing one needs most.
Craig’s house is an old timber place built into the slope of Woolcock Street. There’s a garage below street level and I can hear music reverberating out. I follow the sound. It’s something with guitars. Can’t place it. As I move under the house, I see that the garage is empty bar for a lawnmower, an old couch and some packing boxes, but out back there’s a fire in a shallow pit and a man sitting beside the fire. He has a stereo propped up on an old chair.
‘Hello?’
He doesn’t hear me.
I move about halfway along the house. ‘Hello?’
‘Out here.’
‘Craig?’ I say, stepping into the yard. There’s no garden. Just a Hills Hoist and a path and a line of sad, struggling trees right up the far end. Other than that, there’s dying grass and this fire pit.
Craig – I think it’s him – nods, a joint smouldering in his hand. He’s about my age, a bit older maybe, and not presentable at all. He’s wearing a faded collared shirt barely containing a round beer gut, and this over dirty black denim cut-offs and filthy uncovered feet. He looks like a business student gone to seed.
‘Who are you?’ he says.
‘I’m a friend of Jenny’s.’
‘Oh, right.’ He takes a toke.
‘Are you allowed to have a fire out in the open?’
‘Yeah, I think so.’
‘What is this?’ I nod in the direction of the music.
‘The Veronicas.’
‘Christ. Can I turn it down?’
He shrugs. ‘Hey, can I ask you something?’
I sit on a spare chair beside him. ‘Shoot.’
‘Where is Jenny? Haven’t see her in ages. Have you seen her?’
‘Not in a while.’
‘So, why are you, you know, here? Does she need something? I just … you know.’
‘What?’
‘She can’t send people here for shit if she’s buying her regular stuff somewhere else. That’s not how it works.’
‘She told me you were her boyfriend.’ I’m proud of this improvisation, even as I say it. This is exactly the sort of lie Jenny would tell people and it works on Craig. He coughs out a lungful of smoke and flicks the roach into the fire.
‘What!’
The cough turns into a fit of barking and spitting. As he calms down, I hear a window slide open behind us. A woman hangs her head out and says, ‘Babe, you gotta get that looked at.’
‘Yeah, OK. OK.’
‘Who’s this?’ says the woman.
‘I’m a friend of Jenny’s.’
‘Doesn’t that cunt owe you money, babe?’
Craig says, ‘Carrie, go back inside, all right?’
‘Why?’
‘Just fuckin’ like, go back in. I gotta—’
The window slams shut.
‘That’s my girlfriend,’ he says.
‘So, Jenny was lying?’
‘Kinda. What do you … what do you want?’
‘Did Jenny leave anything here? I’m looking for a dictaphone.’
‘A dick phone? What’s that?’
‘It’s … She never stayed here, right?’
Craig actually moves for the first time. He comes closer, stands over me. ‘What’s she been saying, like, exactly?’
I ignore it. ‘Can you sort me out with something?’
He grabs my arm and yanks me. ‘Where is she?’
‘Let me go.’
Craig twists my arm. I struggle, pull away from him, but only to open him up. While he’s distracted, I come over with the other hand, my right fist whipping down into the side of his head. Craig recoils like he’s been stung by a wasp. He lets go but tries to straighten up too quickly. As he’s staggering sideways, I jab him again, in his side. In a split second he’s on the ground and I’m on top of him, my hand threaded with a fistful of his hair. I don’t know what I’m doing. We don’t grapple in Muay Thai. We don’t get on the ground like this.
This is all me.
‘How do you know Jenny? Tell me or I’ll hit you again.’ I pump my fist tight and feel his scalp flex a little.
‘Fuck, fuck. I just sold gear to her, OK? Let me go.’
‘What sort of gear?’
‘Ice. Speed. Whatever I could … agh … get my hands on. Fuck.’
‘Who hooked you two up?’ I hit him again, just to get it over with. ‘Tell me.’
‘No one.’
‘Craig!’
‘No one. She just rocked up here one night like you.’
‘You know she nearly killed someone on that stuff you gave her?’
‘What?’ He starts coughing and sucking in fast asthmatic breaths. I let him up and he scrambles back a few feet.
‘Tell me everything you remember about her.’
‘Nah, I don’t remember nothing.’
‘Come on, Craig,’ I say, following him. We both hear someone running through the house behind us. I catch his eye and say, ‘I’ll hurt her too.’
‘Look, look, she was a stripper and shit, right? That’s it. Jenny came to me for stuff to keep her up at night. Said she had to work all the time. That’s all. Fuck. That’s it!’
‘Where’d she work?’
‘Sam Hell.’
I know it. A notorious Valley haunt. New information. A door slams behind me. I look over my shoulder and this Carrie woman is running across the yard towards me, holding a kitchen knife.
I point at her and shout, ‘Stop. Stop. Think about it.’
Carrie stops running. She looks at Craig snivelling on the ground. She looks at me.
‘You stay there, he’s stays there, I walk away, OK?’
Carrie nods.
As I pass her I tell her. ‘You’re too smart for this guy.’
In the car, a block from Craig’s house, my arms start to shake so bad I have to pull over. My right hand is swelling up. I unbuckle the seat belt. Tree branches overhead, flickering afternoon light. The walls of the car contract around me.
I close my eyes.
Rapid-fire memories.
Flash.
Flash.
Flash.
I start crying. Huffing breaths in and out like Craig. I dive into the back seat. I scream into the seams.
SERO
13
A path stretches along the mountain range, across snow-covered ledges and down tunnels dug into the rock. The descent takes you deep inside a canyon, a day’s ride from the mountain summit to the canyon floor. At the end of the gorge, you find the entrance to a gated city. On your map, this is a place called Ulteron.
From the outside, Ulteron is a cluttered mass of rooftops and spires set behind a siege wall that spans the full width of the canyon. There is a large iron gate. You line up behind a motley collection of soldiers – all of them drunk and covered in melted snow.
When it’s your turn, the clerk grunts out a greeting.
‘Purpose?’ he says.
‘I’ve come about a priest. I’m without memory.’
‘We’ve all sorts of priests in here.’<
br />
You turn your map over. Sister Rhys has written the word there.
‘Rohank.’
‘Hold on.’ The clerk steps back from his window. A minute later, he reappears. ‘How much gold do you have?’
They take a deposit, something to be forfeited should you cause harm, or find it, in the city. When it’s done, you stand with the soldiers and wait for the gate to rise. As it inches up, one of the men winks at you.
14
At least as far as you remember, Ulteron is like no place you’ve set foot before. All nature and wildness are removed from view. Within the walls, it is like one giant building cut from stone and concrete. A bustling maze. Very narrow and flat. The horse isn’t fond of it. It’s the first thing you agree on.
Hungry, you seek out an inn and find one with a stable. For a small coin, you buy ale and lodging. The innkeeper’s wife shows you to your room. As she turns down the bed, you tell her you’re looking for the priest called Rohank.
She shakes her head. ‘He’s not one to fuss with.’
‘Can you direct me?’
‘Saint Rohank lives above the rest of us, dear. He’s not a poor man. You’d have to ask the local mob for an invitation. There’s a church down the street.’
You look out the window. A group of boys travel the street lighting lanterns. No sign of a church.
‘It’s down some,’ the innkeeper’s wife adds. ‘You know, they say Rohank can see into a person’s heart. It’s a terrible business. I wouldn’t go within a hundred paces of him.’
After she leaves, you tend to your belongings:
The sword.
The stolen clothes.
The charcoal map.
The yellow vial.
After a time, you grow weary of the room and decide to try the church despite the hour.
15
The church at the end of the road is one of the few buildings in the city that sits apart from the others. Stationed in a cobblestone courtyard, the little brick building has an eerie presence. Nothing decorative about it. If not for the doors and signage, one could mistake it for a shed or furnace. The inside is more ornate. Gilded walls, velvet drapes. Dozens of glowing candles. Rows of timber pews polished to the point of reflection. And yet, the ominous feel of the exterior remains. This is not a good place.
