by Rebecca Lim
Still, it will hurt me every day, knowing he’s out there, because I’m not going to forget him. I mean, who forgets meeting the dream guy? It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Some people don’t even get that. But it’s okay to let him go because he was never mine anyway, and I’ve at least seen him. I know he exists.
‘So I’ll live,’ I say out loud without meaning to, like they do in the soaps.
I cover my mouth with one hand, appalled, and Hugh darts me a curious, sidelong glance. ‘There’s living and there’s living,’ he says distantly, gazing back out onto the congested road ahead.
But he’s wrong. It’s all the one state. It’s just getting through, and not letting the absences overwhelm you.
‘Well, goodbye, then,’ I say as we drive under the painted arches of Chinatown, cringing at how banal and emotionless my words sound when all this, all this, is going on inside my head. This is the end of the road for him and me. There should at least be music. ‘And thanks, you know. For the lift.’
Ugh. Somebody sew my mouth closed, please.
My hand is on the door; I’m all ready to leap out and run from how much I suck at small talk. Hugh slides the car into a loading zone opposite my building and turns to me. ‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ he mutters. ‘I’d like to see you again.’
I blink. Two complete non sequiturs. The only thing connecting the two statements? The word see. Bloody nervous word-game disorder.
Hugh hasn’t turned the engine off, which makes it all sound even more matter-of-fact: that if he says he’d like to see me again it will, in fact, come to pass. He’s a go-getter, a hunter. He never gives up. I know that. It’s in his chart.
‘I’ve never met anyone like you,’ he says. Which sounds like a line, but it’s my line and I will hug it to me and milk it later, when I’m alone, for meaning. Turning it over and over incessantly, like a polished jewel. I blink again, everything spun on its head, and Hugh’s dark eyes are intent on me. ‘You said you couldn’t feel anything. But you knew about Fleur. No one will talk to me about her and you knew her name.’
I’m unable to summon up something sharp or sassy in reply. I just can’t. I’m suspended. He reaches out and actually touches the skin of my face: the scarred part, which warms instantly. And I don’t draw away. ‘Does that hurt you?’ he murmurs, leaning forward so that our foreheads are almost touching. The pad of his thumb is resting against my skin and I want to close my eyes and succumb because this guy, this guy, is better than Bio-Oil, better than psychotherapy. If he doesn’t see or mind the scars? Then there are no scars.
We’re leaning in, about to fall, about to do all those theoretical things that theoretical people in books do with their mouths and hands, when a familiar pattern, a worn-out blue plaid, moves into the corner of my eye and just stays there.
I glance up, startled, so that Hugh turns his head to look, too. It’s Simon in his knitted grey beanie. Standing very still across the road, right in my line of sight. Arms crossed, waiting for me. His eyes don’t leave me for a second and the moment between Hugh and I is fleeing; it flies.
Maybe we can get it back. Or maybe, says the voice of reason in my head, reasserting itself huffishly, you should just let it go, okay? You were saying goodbye. Quick ones are easier all round.
My own body fighting me, I sit back from Hugh. ‘I can’t,’ I say simply, ‘not right now.’
Hugh’s posture changes; going rigid. He knows it has something to do with the tall, beat-up-looking guy trying to melt the car from the outside with his grey-green eyes. He turns back quickly, moving so that Simon is entirely blocked from my view. ‘This isn’t the end of it,’ he warns, stroking the skin of my scar again with the pad of his thumb, bringing the heat. ‘I know where to find you.’
I move away from him, putting my pack back up between us like the fence that will always stand between the haves and the have-nots.
‘Everyone does,’ I reply quietly. ‘Best of luck with your life.’ Still holding his gaze, I open my car door and scramble out backwards, adding, like a gibbering numbskull, ‘Really, I mean it. It’ll be a great life. You’ll do great.’
I almost add, thinking better of it: Don’t let having a murderous sicko for a father hold you back. I shut the door—flushed and hot from shooting my mouth off like a fool. Over the roof of the car, all I see is Simon’s taut, bleak face, bones and bruises prominent.
The coupé moves off in a squeal of tyres—I register that, but I don’t really see it go—as I dodge across the street towards Simon. What are we, really? I’ve got nothing to feel guilty about, but I feel it. I’m hangdog, hesitant, like I’ve done something wrong, as I come up onto the kerb in front of him. Simon’s voice is biting, his arms still crossed. ‘Is that the rich guy Wurbik told me about? Why don’t you ever answer your damned phone? You aced it by the way. Dalgeish wasn’t even looking at me after you left. You held the floor then you wiped me with it. Prize is in the bag.’
His tone is as bitter as his body language and fury rises in me, sudden and sharp.
‘How is it my fault if I did better?’ I say incredulously. ‘You had all the answers. You were prepared. You stayed on point. I cried all over my shoes, for fuck’s sake. Give the fat, ugly chick a little credit for being able to—’
Simon cuts me off. ‘Hook a stud? He only wants one thing, Cen; it’s so obvious, it’s nauseating.’
I mean, look at you is what Simon’s really saying.
‘And, like, I’d just give it to him? Right there in his car in the middle of Chinatown?’ I screech, fumbling my house keys out of my bag and punching them into Simon’s chest so hard that he rocks backwards. ‘Like that’s all a rich, good-looking guy would want from me. Sex, not conversation? Not answers? He wants to know whether his dad is responsible for a cold-case rape-murder. And if he happens to like me as well? Well, isn’t that just my luck.’ Simon’s mouth is opening and shutting as I snarl, ‘Get out of my sight, you hypocrite. It’s okay for you to want all of those things—the beautiful life, all the trappings—but not okay for me. When I want it, when I want to reach out and take it because, maybe, just maybe, something’s being handed my way for a change, it’s not permissible. My motives are suspect, or his are. Don’t judge me.’
Simon tries to catch me by the sleeve but I step around him, almost dancing on my toes like a prize fighter. ‘I hope I do win the Tichborne, because if I do I’m going to buy you a car you can actually sleep in which will take you right out of my life. Do what you like,’ I add, pointing up at the darkened windows of my place. ‘Make yourself a sandwich. Plot my downfall. Shit, play me a word in a game you’re never going to win. I’m going for a walk.’
And a moment later I’m lost in the late-afternoon crowd moving uphill through Little Bourke Street, everyone hurrying to get somewhere, be somewhere. I duck through one alleyway, then another, finding that I know the streets like the back of my hand, like the local I never thought I was.
He calls and calls and I ignore him, not sure where I’m really going. People see the shine of tears on my face and stare; most just avert their eyes. When the rain comes down, in sheets, in torrents, I keep walking in circles and squares and zigzaggy lines while people rush and huddle and battle their pop-up umbrellas going inside out from the wind. The no
ise is immense, water rushing down the bluestone gutters, pooling in the dips and warps in the road. Soon my feet and shoes, the legs of my jeans are sodden. I pause outside the 7-Eleven on Exhibition Street feeling stupid about grand gestures, when this prickling starts up, in my gut.
Maybe I do feel things because I’m suddenly aware—an intense awareness—that I’m being observed.
I look across the road, my eyes searching the darkness under the deserted front marquee of the Comedy Theatre. But there is nobody there. Around me, people are hurrying to catch things—the pedestrian crossing, a blue bus, taxis. I am the only still point in a streetscape alive with motion. But the feeling won’t go away; it crawls across me, like something trapped under my skin trying to burrow its way out, and I step into the brightly lit convenience store, spooked.
I check my phone and it chooses that moment to emit the sparkly bling sound that happens when someone plays you a word. Fingers fat and wet and clumsy from the cold, I open the app, thinking it must be Mum, even though it can’t be. But I see that it is Changeling_ 29. Simon. Not with a word worth anything, but a message. My first message from him, ever.
Chilled to the core, I read: Where are you?? Get home. I’m worried.
Home.
And I realise it is. It’s a fetid dump, but in so many ways I’m connected to it now and I want to be there more than anything. But it’s at least three blocks away, more. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Tears welling in my eyes, I brush them away viciously as the Indian guy at the cash register looks on with suspicion because I’m not buying and I’m not talking. I’m just dripping water onto the floor by the newspaper stand, shaking like a drug addict over the screen of my phone.
Fumbling at the keypad, I type with bloodless fingers: I WANT to be home. Scared. Feel I’m being watched / followed. My words crop up in a golden bubble at the side of the game.
Simon’s answer comes back right away, slotting straight underneath in a bubble of white: Where are you? Come to you.
I think frantically, my eyes raking the windows facing out onto the Lonsdale and Exhibition Street intersection.
‘Can I help you?’ the Indian guy queries over my shoulder, but I just wave a hand in his direction, so that he takes himself back around the safety screen, pissed.
I know there is a narrow, dog-legged shortcut just around the corner that takes you back past the front of the Chinese Museum into Chinatown. I can wait there. In the museum, no one will want me to buy anything or move on, and it’s public enough that nothing can happen to me if I stand, dripping wet, by the pretty girl at the front counter.
I type: Chinese Museum, hurry. Hitting send, then sending one more word: Please.
Simon’s bubble comes back: Cohen Place, got it. Coming.
Then he does the same thing as me, sending another message hot on the heels of his last one: And you’re not, you know. Ugly. You’re kind of unforgettable, actually.
There’s no time to savour the amazingness of that perfectly punctuated message right now. Later, we can thrash out the exact context and parameters of his words, but for now I shove my phone deep into my jacket pocket and head back out the sliding doors.
Going left up Lonsdale, I see the half-hidden opening to the laneway just past a deserted souvenir shop, its windows full of sheepskin scuffs and Aussie flags, clip-on koalas. A man emerging from a pokies venue that opens onto the laneway actually pauses in his stride to let me pass, alerted by something in my face, in the way I’m holding myself.
I burst through the doors of the Chinese Museum and the girl behind the counter nods in bewilderment as I gasp, ‘Is it okay if I just wait here?’
That feeling, the crawling feeling, hasn’t for a moment gone away. A chill moves through my guts when I see through the museum’s long front windows: a dark shape emerging from the laneway I’ve just come from, wet grey hair plastered to his gaunt, familiar features.
As his head quests from side to side, turning towards the museum’s doors, I back further into the building, hoping I haven’t been seen. The woman calls out, ‘Miss? Miss!’ as I start running up the stairs.
22
Every room I pass is lit up like a Christmas tree, the light stark against the unnatural early afternoon darkness outside the windows. I hear heavy feet on the stairs below and make for the female toilets signposted for the third floor, intending to lock myself in until Kingdom Come, or at least until Simon does.
As I’m about to crest the landing outside the chamber of photographs, the lift between me and the restrooms opens and Don Sturt steps out, his hands already extended, like he’s reaching for me. I let out a scream, so high and terrified you can barely hear it.
‘Don’t be afraid!’ he pleads, taking a tentative step forward. ‘Don’t run!’
On the turning below me, the Chinese woman from the front counter has come to a stop, her eyes wide and frightened. A look passes between us: that I’m not dangerous, that I’m not the problem; the tall white man, the man who stinks of booze, is the one to watch. Don hasn’t seen her, but I catch her beginning to back up quietly and head back down, her steps undetectable above the shudder and roar of the rain outside.
Help is coming, it is. I have to tell myself that.
I force myself to keep still, guts quivering as Don draws closer. I’m neither up nor down. I’m at a disadvantage, frozen here on the flight, looking up into his pockmarked face, the muscles of his seamed mouth, working.
‘She saw the darkness in me,’ Don pleads, his yellow-flecked eyes very wide, ‘and she wasn’t afraid.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, voice shaking. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I need you to know that when I left her,’ he tells me, hands still out in a gesture like supplication, ‘she was alive. We drove all day, and all of the next. I talked and talked and she listened and she was alive when I left her. She was fine.’
I shake my head, uncomprehending. But horror dawns when he says, ‘She said you were the smartest person she’d ever known. She said you’d figure she wasn’t dead, just gone, and she couldn’t tell you, because then the magic wouldn’t work. That’s what she called it: magic.’
I sink to the stair I was just standing on, unable to hold myself up.
They tell you the darndest things.
Even if I could speak, there are too many questions. So I fumble for my phone, right there under his nose, and start recording him, every word. I mean, I’m just holding my phone in my hand, but he doesn’t stop talking.
Swaying slightly, he says, ‘Not like them others. We gave it to them; every man took his turn. And when they wouldn’t, when they played up, tried to run away into the bush, we laid into them with sticks and bottles—after a while I had to drink myself stupid to block out the screaming. But not your mother. Didn’t touch her. She was good when I left her. She was fine.’
Fine, that stupid word that’s supposed to convey, what, fineness?
‘Who are you talking about?’ I whisper, this sick taste of iron in my mouth. ‘What “others”?’
‘Them girls from Armidale. Hitchhikers. Coming on for forty years. We showed ’em a good time then carried on the party. At Mount Warning.’
Something monumental has shifted in the man. It’s like he’s spewed forth some irritant that’s been buried deep, like a bullet, or a fishhook, for years. He’s actually hunched over, clutching at his stomach, purging his guts out. ‘We left ‘em tied up,’ he whimpers, ‘facedown choking, like, on their own blood. When they was found, they was bones. And all this time, I’ve kept it quiet, carried it in me, tried my best to make amends, do some good, make my peace, but your mum…’
Something, even in his speech, has broken down. The country boy he used to be is coming up through his pores, rising like a ghost.
‘So she wanted to go somewhere she could feel the presence of death, that’s what she said and did I know anywhere? Just asked me one day, out of the blue, on the way back from El’s place and, and…’ His eyes fill with tears as I watch. ‘And I said I knew; I knew a place all right.’
My mouth fills with an onrush of saliva, like I’m about to throw up. Don took Mum to that place, where some atrocity was committed. She must have been so scared. To think she got into a van with this well-dressed, unassuming man, this trusted acquaintance of an acquaintance. And that underneath his expensive clothes and well-kept shoes is this monster inside.
