by Rebecca Lim
Before me, the shadowed room rises up steeply in tiers of fixed bench seats and tables; it’s shaped like a small amphitheatre. Everything is painted black, and the huge crystal chandelier in the ceiling looms unlit; so high off the ground that it hurts me to look up at it.
‘Oldest operational theatre restaurant in Melbourne,’ Newlands says proudly, helping me down off the side of the stage. ‘Featuring one of the few surviving star traps in Australia.’
Newlands points up at an octagonal shape set into the floor at centre stage. We’re standing at eye level to the thing, which has eight separate hinges, one for each section of the asterisk that bisects the octagon. I imagine the lines breaking up, springing open like a vicious, toothed flower made of wood, disgorging tomfoolery and hijinks from below.
‘It was a hit when we did a run of vampire shows in the 70s; people couldn’t get enough of it. Dry ice, flames, you name it, and suddenly the baddie’s right there, amongst it. How’d he get there? Everyone screaming their heads off. It was a sensation. But we don’t use it now because the mechanism jams and there’s no surprise in it these days. The last person who shot up out of “Hell” to terrorise the living had a nasty shock.’ The old man’s eyes go distant and opaque. ‘Nearly broke us.’
We follow Newlands up a steep set of stairs at the left of the auditorium towards street level, passing a deserted bar and ticket booth. He pauses with us by the front door, just inside the scuffed-looking foyer that still smells of the cigarettes of yesteryear.
‘I’m here every day, except Mondays, till late, just remember,’ Newlands tells me, his voice grave, his fingers still curled beneath my elbow. ‘Family have wanted me retired for years, but retired is another word for dead in my book.’
He lets go of me then, and pulls open the heavily carved wooden front door, holding it slightly ajar. ‘Perverts all over these days,’ he says, swinging the door wider and nudging us out onto the threshold. ‘Can’t be too careful, lovey.’
There are faded black-and-white theatre shots plastered to the windows on either side of the entrance—people in feather boas and lederhosen and crazy headgear, exaggerated face paint—and a colony of dead flies lying around on the sills underneath with curled-up legs and dull wings. Newlands urges, ‘Ask for Uncle Des, understand? Always welcome. Greyson was like a son to me.’ His voice is sombre. ‘Watched him grow up around the place.’
Then he shuts the heavy door in our faces.
With a sweeping gaze that takes in the Sichuan noodle house and sushi train joint on either side, the entrance to the commercial car park just beyond them and the down-at-heel hotel across the road, Boon turns us left and walks briskly past a bottle shop, a mini-mart and a travel agent before we cross towards a faded building on the corner that proclaims itself Her Majesty’s Theatre. We cut back into the top end of Little Bourke Street, still blocks away from home. Boon steers me under a ceremonial stone gateway, between a matched pair of snarling stone lions with curved fangs, bulbous eyes and clawed feet.
We walk up a ramp at the far end of a small stone square and enter a set of wooden swing doors. The young Asian woman at the cash register at the far end of the foyer looks up enquiringly before breaking into a smile of recognition. Boon waves airily and simply proceeds up a set of stairs without payment, although the sign near the register sets out all the prices quite clearly. ‘Something to show you,’ he says as we climb.
As I look in on each floor, I see ceremonial dragons, masks, ancient artefacts. It’s the museum Boon spoke of to Newlands, but it’s a Chinese museum.
I scowl fiercely. ‘Propaganda!’ I mutter, unsure why we’re here, as we emerge into a light, airy exhibition space on the top floor. ‘Now is not the time for me to get back in touch with my ancestral roots, or whatever. Couldn’t I just wait somewhere else while you run recon…?’
‘Just see,’ Boon says calmly.
The hall-like upstairs room we enter is filled solely with photographs. By the door are pictures of kids from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s in all the bad fashions and shocker hairstyles: quiffs, bowl cuts, shags, mullets, flicks and perms. They’re all Chinese, or variations on; caught forever in black-and-white or lurid technicolour. I bend and look at some of the names: Goon and Louey and all the weird bastardisations wrought by the Gods of Immigration, legalised forever. There’s a Peter Gok Kar and a Shirley Wing Loon; a whole dynasty of Quong Gongs, poor souls: Shirleys and Maureens and Denises, big toothy girls with long limbs and long faces, milk-fed skin.
Neither here nor there, just like me.
‘How long do I have to stay here looking, feeling, belonging?’ I demand accusingly. ‘Until it’s safe to go home?’
‘Look around for as little or as long as you like,’ Boon says mildly. ‘Just stop by my shop first, before you head on upstairs to your place? I’ll check the building; make sure there are no more surprises.’
He pats me on the shoulder, about to turn on his heel, when he seems to recall something. He takes my home telephone out of my hands and tucks it into my backpack, doing up the zip so firmly that I’m almost lifted off the ground. ‘You wanted to know,’ he says from behind me, ‘what was missing from your parents’ apartment? That detective asked me to tell you, but I can show you.’
Suddenly, I’m conscious of this sick, breathless feeling inside me, my pulse hammering in my inner ear. Boon crosses the carpet and I trail after him, surrounded by a diorama of grinning Asian faces: babies, toddlers, youths. We pass a section devoted to Chinese boys in matching football jerseys, posing in the classic, butch, arms-crossed way, tallest at the back, shortest at the front. Teams from the 50s straight through to the early 90s. ‘Ethnics’ versus ‘locals’. I can imagine the backchat and niggling at the sidelines. Must have been awesome.
Boon jabs a forefinger into one of the frames in passing and says, ‘That’s your dad, front row, centre. He was short until he turned fifteen, but he was fast. His trick was to keep running: ran all the bigger boys into the ground until they were too tired to kick straight or hold the ball.’
I bend, peering at the tiny image, heart in my mouth. So it is true; I do have his eyes. We lost all our photos in the fire and, even in dreams, I can’t recall his face. This is the first concrete proof I’ve ever seen that he even existed.
‘He’s in this one, too,’ Boon says, passing a school formal photo, all the boys in dodgy 80s tuxes, a scattering of frilled shirts; all the girls in horrid bright colours like emerald and scarlet and amethyst, with crimped hair and straight bangs, hideous corsages made of carnations. ‘Dance at the Melbourne Town Hall. Big deal at the time. To your dad, anyway.’
Dad’s a lot taller in this photo, stiff-looking in a black tuxedo, white shirt and ruby-red cummerbund, with a bogan haircut: spiky on top, short sides, long, mullety back. Haircut aside, I am shocked at his lean, tanned handsomeness. I look like neither of them, it’s true.
Some new animal.
Boon shoots me a quick look. ‘But you wanted to know about the missing photo?’ he reminds me.
He stops before a picture in the far back corner: of an olive-skinned little boy with a broad face, gappy teeth and the kind of terrible haircut that indicates an actual mixing bowl might have been involved. The boy has smiling dark eyes and a sprinkling of fr
eckles across his nose, and is, inexplicably, dressed in a green Peter Pan costume with green stockings, hands fisted on his hips in a classic Errol Flynn-style pose. He can’t be more than six or seven, chubby and adorable, posed against a backdrop of powder-blue photographic curtain made up to look like a cloud-filled sky.
‘This is just a copy, of course,’ Boon murmurs. ‘The original was inside the frame. But this is it. This was what was taken off the wall in the apartment.’
Long after Boon’s footsteps on the wooden stairs have faded away, I stand under a shaft of late afternoon sunlight, just staring at my father as a child.
12
When I’m politely chased out of the museum at closing time, I emerge to find night has fallen and the female restaurant touts are out on the street, in their slinky, faux-silk cheongsams and Uggs, waving menus at anything living that goes by. As I trail past the shop with all the Taiwanese-style, pastel-coloured cream cakes lined up in rows in the window, I’m reminded again that I’ve eaten nothing since an awkward bowl of muesli with Simon Thorn. Wherever the hell he’s got to.
Boon had told me to check in first, so I do. The bell over the street-facing door jingles as I enter his shop. ‘Avicenna,’ he calls out in warning, but it’s too late, because the tall, thin guy from the arcade, the one who gave me chase clear up three blocks, is leaning against the door in the far wall that opens out into my stairwell.
I yank my mobile phone out, intent on calling Wurbik. But my fingers aren’t working and, in my panic, I drop the phone onto the hardwood floor. In a red haze of fear I scrabble for it, but it’s like the phone’s alive: it is slippery, impossible to catch. It pops through my slick grasp, once, twice, and I’m almost sobbing.
‘Avicenna,’ someone says gently.
I look up, startled to see an elderly woman I hadn’t even noticed perched on the stool in front of Boon’s counter. She’s slight, bird-boned, and a little bent over, but from the neck down she could be a twenty-year-old art student in a chunky, grey marle cardigan over slim, indigo jeans and black leather ankle boots. Her long grey hair is pulled back in an elegant knot at the nape of her neck and, under her wrinkles, the structure of her face is lovely. And kind of familiar, even though I know I’ve never seen her before.
‘I’m sorry we gave you a scare,’ she says quietly, ‘but it was imperative we try to catch you. To ask, you see.’
I sit back on my haunches to better see her face, which is really quite beautiful. Ruined, but arresting. There are deep grooves between her nose and mouth, and her forehead is a patchwork of crisscrossing lines, up and down above the bridge, long parallel scores, like knife scars, across her forehead. Her eyes appear sunken, like she no longer sleeps; the skin below them purple as bruises.
‘Just to talk,’ the old woman adds quickly. ‘To put our case across.’
I look up at the gaunt-looking man by the door and his dirty-green, yellow-flecked eyes slide away. My brain slowly puts together that the two of them are a package deal and that I was being fetched. I take in the diamond studs in the old lady’s ears, the heavy, antique rings on her bony hands that breathe old money, exquisite taste. She must have been the one getting out of the front seat of the Mercedes.
‘Who are you people?’ I rasp, rising from the floor. I scoop my mobile up, too, the screen lit-up, ready for use if I need it.
Boon’s eyes are apologetic as he brings out his own stool and plants it beside the old woman. He pats the surface of it before leaving the shop through the stairwell entrance. The tall man sidesteps to let him pass, then moves right back into place, darting a look at me before refocusing on his shoes.
‘Please,’ the old woman says, indicating the rickety steel stool beside her. I perch on it reluctantly, my backpack jammed between me and the glass counter, the hard shape of my home phone digging into my lower back.
‘This is Don Sturt,’ she adds, ‘my companion. Who makes sure I take my pills, and gets me where I need to go,’ indicating the man by the door. I seem to drop back into my body from a great height, understanding all at once.
I turn to the old woman immediately. ‘You’re the mother,’ I say in a weird rush, recognising Fleur under all the wrinkles and lines and slackness. ‘Mrs Bawden.’
The woman gives a little laugh that doesn’t hold any amusement. ‘Oh, there hasn’t been a Mr Bawden for many years, dear. I go by Eleanor Charters these days. It deters the sightseers and amateur investigators. Cranks. They’ve given up trying to track me down for anniversary interviews. Don’s put a stop to that.’
Looking at him now, I see Don is at least a decade younger than the old woman. By his deferential body language, I don’t think he’s a companion in the biblical sense, but you never know. She could be the world’s oldest cougar.
‘You didn’t have to run,’ Don says gruffly, glancing at me then away. ‘I wasn’t going to hurt you.’
Eleanor Charters grasps both my hands tightly in hers. ‘I’m so sorry about your mother. It’s the very worst time to be asking a favour, but I’ve waited so long. And when Don told me that you could read these things, just like her, I needed to know…’
She reminds me of Kircher. Her need, all-consuming, so much greater than mine. I withdraw my hands, wriggling out of my backpack before opening it up and rifling through it.
I show her the pages I photocopied out of Mum’s journal. ‘This is all there was,’ I say, pointing at the names and dates, birthplaces and times in Mum’s writing, the note to call Don Sturt for more details. ‘She hadn’t started. There’s nothing to really tell you.’
Something happens to Eleanor Charters’ face as she absorbs this. ‘Don?’ she queries in a funny, high voice. ‘You’re the private investigator. What do you suggest we do now? I had been led to believe that there were charts, results.’
Sturt clears his throat and says, still not really looking at me, ‘So we had an initial meeting with your mum, right? El and me, and she says she can do it. Produce, you know, a hoary…’
‘Horary,’ I say dryly.
‘Yeah, hoary reading,’ Sturt ploughs on, ‘for these four fellas. It’s a cold case, see, coming up on thirty years…’
Eleanor’s eyes drop to her knees. ‘And no one’s ever been charged,’ she whispers. ‘Dozens— dozens—were interviewed. This was in the days before DNA testing was commonplace, you understand, so although physical evidence was taken from, from, her body’—Eleanor swallows but doesn’t look up—‘corresponding…material was not taken from all of the men who were interviewed, not until much later. But by then the original evidence was misplaced; people had died, fled overseas, changed their names…’
She gives a small, crooked smile and I catch Don looking at us, a quick sideways thing with his eyes, before he looks down again.
‘Hopeless,’ she finishes raggedly. ‘Nothing left to do but consult the heavens. Which saw and would know… everything. The only true witness to events.’ Her voice rises and cracks on the last word and her eyes flick back up to mine. ‘Based on years of interviews and research by kind people like Don here, we think these are the four men “most likely” due to strange alibis, responses, inconsistencies. Tendencies. Things that can’t be explained. And gut feeling.’
Don clears his throat, takes over
talking. ‘Dirt on these ones,’ he says, ‘there’s plenty. All we want is some kind of ’ —the look he shoots Eleanor is hard to read—‘impartial corroboration. But we didn’t want to burden your mum with all the research it took to get us here. We didn’t want to predispose her mindset, so to speak. So, as we knew the material best, we gave her the bare fac—’
Eleanor cuts in. ‘I just want to know if it’s possible.’ Her voice is husky with emotion. ‘Possible to tell if one of these men was born bad enough to do this thing. That’s all.’
‘She took a down payment,’ Don adds, sounding strained, ‘your mum. We’d understood that she would call as soon as she had the, you know, hoary readings ready.’
‘And then the police call me,’ Eleanor wails, clasping her hands together at chest height, ‘asking if I knew anything about why she might be missing. And then Don tells me he saw you with Elias Kircher, whose issues with family are the stuff of legend, so naturally I hoped…’
Chilled, I glance in Don’s direction but he won’t look at me, and Boon chooses that moment to re-enter his shop. I can tell by the gentle lift of his eyebrows that it’s fine to go back upstairs; I’d worked myself up over nothing.
These people hadn’t meant you any actual harm were what Boon’s eyebrows were saying. All they want from you is the name of a killer.
Eleanor bends forward and puts her small, bejewelled hands on my knees. ‘People come into your life for a reason.’ Her voice is beseeching as she looks into my face. ‘I am asking you to finish what she agreed to do. It may mean nothing, but all I want to know is whether it is possible...’
‘To tell if someone was born bad enough to…?’ I repeat tentatively.
