by Rebecca Lim
I have no idea, but I say, ‘Yeah, sure. I’ll let him know. Sorry, tell me again, where were you calling from?’
The woman tells me Royal Melbourne Hospital and I ask for directions, and she tells me, suspiciously, ‘Intensive Care Unit. His mum’s situation’s worsened. Tell him it’s critical that he comes back in, as soon as possible. Her organs…’
She thanks me, and I thank her and hang up while we’re passing some snobby boys’ school all decked out in bluestone and ivy and broad skirts of emerald-green playing field. I turn to Don and tell him quite calmly that if it’s all right with him, could he drop me outside the Emergency Department at the Royal Melbourne instead of taking me home?
Don doesn’t actually answer. But instead of cutting right at Flinders Street Station, he turns left and does a sharp U-turn into Elizabeth Street, sending up a flock of dirty pigeons. While he negotiates the giant nightmare roundabout just before Parkville with five hundred other angry drivers, I send a quick message to the mystery mobile caller who keeps calling me, but doesn’t leave messages.
You need to go back to the hospital NOW and make a decision. They said something about her organs. I’m very sorry.
I’m not dumb. I can put two and two together. He wants to talk but he can’t. I get that.
The mystery guy may be one of the raft of random mouth-breathers I seem to have attracted in the days since Mum’s story got out. But I don’t think so. What had Eleanor said? Gut feeling. Even the sound of him drawing breath has become familiar to me, and necessary.
A moment later Don’s pulling into the hospital’s front courtyard and I’m out of there without a backward glance, asking for directions to the ICU ward.
Looking through the ward doors, I see that the ICU is full. I don’t recognise any of the still and shadowy shapes strapped to rhythmically beeping machines as having anything to do with Simon Thorn. And because I’m nothing to him, or to the ill and the dying in that room, the nurses won’t let me past the night desk.
There is nothing left to do now except call Malcolm Cheung from a quiet place. But I can’t make myself do it. Unsure what I’m even doing here, I head in the opposite direction to quiet, backtracking towards the public cafeteria, which is lit up like a bad dream and packed with people. I’ll need to be with someone, anyone, when I hear what I’m supposed to hear in its proper context.
The air smells of hot pies. Something by The Carpenters is playing and it’s like a sign. Mum loved The Carpenters; loved that tragic, anorexic singer with the voice like liquid caramel. I join the queue at the window for hot food and the woman behind me says out loud, nudging me, as if we’re in the middle of a conversation: ‘Isn’t it sad? Such a beautiful smile. Such a beautiful woman.’
I turn and look at her and her tight, grey perm and lilac velour tracksuit, tan comfort shoes. ‘Sorry?’
The woman takes a step back when she clocks my face but she points up, gamely, above the counter, at a TV screen. It has white, computery text running along the bottom of the picture which I recognise as tele-text for deaf people. Put on especially for those cafeteria patrons who like to watch their news while enjoying The Carpenters singing of rainy days and Mondays; even though it’s a Tuesday today, and fine out. The text says:
–blood-stains found in a clearing, several kilometres from the main hiking trail close to the summit.
I see people in orange jumpsuits, boots and hard hats with miner’s lamps emerging from the trees with the characters SES emblazoned across the front on a glowing white band positioned at chest level. A slightly out-of-focus man in a police-issue jumpsuit holds up a plastic bag with something white inside. The words continue:
–and emergency workers with assistance from the Queensland police cadaver dog squad recovered what appears to be an item of clothing. Homicide detectives are pursuing several lines of enquiry–
The text makes way for the newsreader saying brightly, ‘In other news…’ and my eye is drawn to the photograph behind the newsreader’s shoulder: a head and shoulders shot of an elderly businessman in a navy suit. He looks younger in this photo because the neat pencil moustache is not yet completely white. It’s the kind of photo you’d see on the wall of an office building, or in an official report. No red-eye, a snowy white background; the subject deliberately angled towards you in a firm, reassuring stance. Your money is in good hands.
The photo is followed by images of several rescue boats motoring around the partially submerged hull of a big yacht. Blue water; open water; waves. The sea under bright sunlight, dazzling: like the eyes of the giant, in the curiosity shop. Police divers in sleek wetsuits and face masks.
‘Excuse me,’ the old woman nudges me again, less friendly this time. ‘Were you going to order?’
I can feel myself beginning to tremble, already starting to gasp, so I step to one side so the woman can get at her pre-heated pastry items without delay. Face tilted towards the screen, I keep reading, the blood roaring in my ears:
Mr Kircher, a non-executive director of several ASX top 100-listed companies and founder of biotech powerhouse Emer-Tech, is survived by six adult children from several marriages, and
five grandchildren–
Foul play–
Homicide–
Contract hit gone wrong–
17
I think I might have screamed, or maybe my knees buckled. Many hands push and pull me to a table in the corner near a stand full of packaged chips and someone shoves my head down between my knees and people are saying:
Take a deep breath!
Take it easy, love.
Settle down, it’ll soon pass.
Can I call your mum for you?
All on top of each other: so that it’s a mess of instructions, a mess of well-meaning voices. A cruelty of kindnesses. I almost dig out my phone and thrust it at them, wanting to scream: You try! You try calling my mum because I can’t seem to get through to her.
But I place my head on the table instead, the surface pressing into my cheek. There are hard crumbs still on it, which are hurting my scars and mixing with the tears leaking out of my eyes. And I could just about close them tight and sleep here, shut them and never wake up, never make the call, when I hear someone say—in a voice I recognise, but sort of don’t, because it’s thick and awkward and tight, not smooth and assured—‘I’ll take care of her from here, thanks. Nothing to see.’
Someone pulls out the chair at the head of my table, sits down heavily, and there’s the grumble of people talking in low voices moving away. I can feel him trying very hard not to touch me because he’s not a toucher, and neither am I, not really, and it would be—
‘This is fucked,’ is all he says. Knowing as well as I do that saying sorry actually doesn’t cut it in cases like ours. Neither of us caused it. Neither of us can take it back, or change the outcome. For a second I get what Boon was saying about how everything is connected and this, we two, are just links in a chain of awfulness that stretches on forever. Atoms bashing against each other in a vast vat of bashing atoms.
‘Put Malcolm out of his misery and call him,’ Simon says in that tight, scratchy voice I recognise as the voice that comes after too much cr
ying. ‘He’s even called me looking for you, which is desperate.’
‘What, the way the hospital called me looking for you?’ I shoot back, taking my head off the table and actually squealing because Simon’s face is a pulpy-looking mess: grey-green eyes, small and puffy, set in a mass of bruises over a split lower lip with a jewel of bright blood hanging right in the centre. There is an open gash across the bridge of his already broken nose and purple bruises in the shape of thumb marks on either side of his windpipe.
‘What happened to your face?’ I breathe and Simon laughs, wiping the blood away, although it’s clear it hurts him to laugh. ‘Not telling,’ he says, ‘until you tell me what happened to yours because you never did say…’
My tears dissolve into a smile that dissolves back into tears. I bury my face in my fleecy sleeves and tell him how I just saw the submerged hull of Elias Herman Kircher’s luxury yacht sticking up out of the water. On the television.
‘Death of subject indicated,’ I whisper. ‘Sudden, violent and unnatural death indicated involving spouse and/or some other person related to subject through close business or professional connections. Travel and water indicated, asset of great value indicated that is not “fixed”. Afflictions associated with the blood indicated. Afflictions associated with swallowing, digestion and lungs also indicated.’
Simon, too appalled to answer, says nothing.
‘But that’s not the worst part,’ I sob, my words so hard to make out that he is forced to lean forward. I know, because his breath is stirring my hair. ‘I think they found something of hers!’ I wail, recognising for the first time what my conscious mind had refused to countenance: searchers emerging from thick scrub, a dense, old-growth forest, at sunset. ‘They used cadaver dogs.’ I’d never heard of them before, but the words need no explanation.
Simon does touch me then, just a warm, lean hand on my shoulder. And I do something that’s brave, even for me. I twist a little in my seat and grab that hand, which causes him to give a yelp.
It’s not the reaction I was expecting, and I loosen my grip, looking down at his grazed and oozing knuckles resting across my palm, understanding something at last: that Simon never worked out with punching bags at some designer gym. He was the punching bag. No one sleeps in their car for fun. Something must have come to a head; some critical, terrible thing that has ended with his mother lying motionless in a hospital ward, rapidly shutting down.
‘I’ve been so wrong about you,’ I say in a low voice.
Simon doesn’t draw away, saying awkwardly, ‘You should have seen the other guy. The de facto human being who supplied her, and bashed her, and called it love. If he decides to press assault charges maybe they’ll just cancel each other out?’ He gives this rattly laugh that might be a sob.
For once I don’t rush in fearing the silences. I let him talk: about how every window in the house was broken and there was actual human shit on the carpets; how his mum weighed less than a fourteen-year-old girl because she’d forget to eat, but never to shoot up; how her corneas were still good enough to donate, though the doctors would have to get in, to know for sure, about the rest. But she’d be okay with that. Underneath, she’d been a good person. She just loved these dangerous men she could never walk away from.
He looks up into my eyes, pleading, ‘How do you make someone want to live?’
‘You can’t,’ I say, getting a catch in my breathing as the awareness suddenly blossoms between us that we are holding hands. I can feel it through the skin of his palm, the new tension. So I withdraw mine gently first, because defence is always the best form of attack, right? ‘You can’t make anyone do anything,’ I whisper, hot and confused, the thoughts struggling to come. ‘You can’t really ever know them; only what they choose to show you.’
I am talking about his mum, but I’m also speaking of mine.
‘Call him,’ Simon urges over my bowed head.
I look around then: at the three nuns in top-to-toe white at a table across the room; at the old man and his wife squabbling over a bag of lolly-coloured pharmaceuticals they’ve got spread out between them; at a sad-faced teen and his exhausted-looking mum having a silent, solemn early dinner.
‘Good a place as any,’ I agree.
Malcolm picks up almost as soon as I put the call through. I don’t need to actually say anything because he’s had a statement prepared for hours in anticipation of just this moment. They need to run tests, of course, but they think they got her blouse and I will, at some stage, have to come in to formally identify it. ‘It’s making its way back by police chopper right now,’ he tells me.
My mother, without her stupid, foofy blouse, on a two-degree night.
I don’t really take in what Malcolm says next about the operation of tollway gantries and the mechanics of SIM card analysis, how police technicians have been working around the clock to try and narrow down the vehicle she must have travelled in to get to Mount Warning. Someone swears they saw her crying at a petrol station on the New South Wales–Victorian border. It was her long, pale hair that caught the woman’s attention, her obvious distress. Even when the Caucasian driver of the dark-coloured van—Black? Grey? Navy?—ducked out to do something the servo cameras didn’t catch, Mum never got out of the front passenger seat of the van. She didn’t appear to be restrained, but you never know.
‘The Queensland bomb squad’s actually looking at whether someone planted explosives on board Kircher’s yacht,’ I hear Malcolm add from a long way away. ‘I’m only telling you this because I’ve got a recording of your voice here that says you saw it coming. You caught the news? How they recovered three bodies? Kircher, the wife and her lover. That was unexpected. Like a bad movie. If it was supposed to look like an accident, someone cocked that up badly.’
I can’t make my throat work. After a humane pause, Malcolm clears his own and says kindly, ‘It’s a lot to process, Avicenna. Call me back if you can think of any questions, okay? I’m right here.’
Then he hangs up and I look down at Simon’s battered hand, which has somehow made its way back into mine. I can see individual hairs and freckles; make out the snaking blue of his veins in the parts that aren’t too messed-up.
My voice, when it finally comes, sounds faded. ‘Part of me has been hoping—even though it’s the worst kind of thing to hope, you know?—that she just went crazy, couldn’t take it anymore, and walked out. I could almost stand that—that maybe the pressure of our life got to her, and she just left.’
I cradle Simon’s hand in mine for a moment longer before depositing it gently back on the table. He looks down at it for a second, as if he’s unsure whether it belongs to him.
‘They’re looking for the van, running the criminal records of the owners of vehicles that went through the tollway that night. There’s a contender registered to a builder in Glenroy and another to a rural property in Macedon; a meat transport vehicle with dirty plates belonging to an abattoir in Footscray. But they’re still working on it.’
I’m proud of how calm I’m sounding. Later, maybe, when I am home, and in my pyjamas, I will break into pieces; but not yet.
‘You need to get upstairs.’ I phrase it like a question, in case Simon needs the hand-holding returned. But he shakes his head, already rising from the t
able, his thoughts already moving outward—the way they always do when he decides to do something—as he strides out of the room.
I wish I had that ability of his: to inject iron into my soul; temporarily slough off my troubled life, as if it were a dirty coat.
Where do I go from here? I think. Where do I go?
Boon’s shop is in darkness as I let myself into the gloomy stairwell to my apartment. A single voice floats down from above; there is desultory laughter, the rumble of a one-way conversation. Some weirdo talking to himself on the landing outside my door.
For a moment, frozen below stairs, I consider leaving again. But I’m exhausted, and I have a direct line to the Victoria Police, so I force myself to keep moving upward, my tread deliberately heavy. I transfer my mobile into the pocket of my hoodie just in case, and take my slender silver Maglite torch out of my pack. I close my right hand around the base of it, so that the thing is protruding out of my clenched fist. If I have to, I will drive it into the soft tissues of the neck or the face, the way Mum taught me, when we lived near Rainbow.
A voice floats down. ‘Avicenna? It’s Hugh.’
And I hesitate again, mid-step, my skin going hot, remembering how he was so beautiful to look at that I couldn’t do it properly, I lost all nerve. Being in the guy’s presence was like a kind of suffering. I’d wanted to grab him and… I don’t know. It’s all technical stuff I’ve read about in books from there. The mind digresses.
