Crow Shine

by Alan Baxter

  “Hungover again? You sound awful.”

  “Good morning to you too, Stella, lovely to hear your voice.”

  She chose to ignore that. “I got your email. David, let’s not take this to court. Really, can’t you just be honest about your pay and give us what Joshua and Tyler need for a good life?”

  David closed his eyes, tipping his head back, counting to five. “I’m being honest, Stella. My income is assessed, I’m not earning any cash on the side or anything like that. I love my boys, I’m giving everything I can. I’m living in a fucking shoe box for their sake.”

  There was silence for a long moment at the other end. Eventually, “David, your boys really need all the help they can get.”

  “And I’m giving them all the fucking money I can,” he barked, not even thinking to count this time. “They could probably use a father around them too.”

  “They don’t want to see you. It’s not just me. They’re scared of you.”

  “Scared? Come on, Stella.”

  “They put up with a lot after you changed. They learned to avoid you when you were drinking, learned to ignore your shouts and screams at night. But walking into their room, naked and ranting and threatening?”

  David ground the heel of one hand into an eye socket. “I was sleep-walking, they know that.”

  Stella sounded very tired, very sad. “No, they don’t. You told them that. Shit, you told me that, but none of us really believe you. You’ve changed, David, and the boys are scared of you. Frankly, so am I.”

  There was silence again. David ached for his boys. He ached for Stella too, if he was honest. And he knew he’d lost them all through his own selfishness. And Stella was right, he had changed. Undoubtedly, irredeemably changed. “I really don’t have any more money to give,” he said at last.

  “Try to find some, please. Stop drinking and start working harder. Get a promotion or something. I can’t support the boys properly on the child support I get.”

  Stop drinking and get a promotion. Sure, it was that easy. She always had been able to say the right thing to really make him angry. “Why don’t you get a fucking job? Sitting on your arse, taking all the state help you can get and digging fucking holes in me! They’re both in school all day, Josh starts fucking high school next year. They’re not babies any more, Stella. Get a ten till three job or something and try fucking contributing yourself!”

  The phone went dead at the other end. That was about right. As ever, when the subject gets too close to the bone, just walk away. David took the phone away from his ear, stared at the screen. His two boys, grinning at him in their school play costumes from two Christmases ago. It was the most recent picture he had. He wasn’t surprised they were scared of him; he believed Stella about that. His eyes prickled with tears and the pounding in his head intensified, his hangover giving him a beating for his crimes against his family. It was no less than he deserved. Sniffing back his rage and sorrow he walked into the building and headed for the lifts.

  His day was a drudgery of phone calls and news feeds, checking wires, drinking as much bad machine coffee as he could manage, trying to ignore the slamming in his forebrain and the nausea in his gut. Lunchtime came around and Mandy offered to do a Macca’s run. A double cheeseburger, fries and a Coke made him feel a lot better and that in turn made him feel worse when he thought about it. He used to be proud of his body, his fitness, his vitality. He wasn’t fat and wasted yet, but it couldn’t be far away. By the time he knocked off he had decided that tonight he wasn’t going to drink. He would eat something healthy, hang out at home and not drink. Just to prove to himself that he could. By the time he walked out the front doors of his building, hands shaking, he was questioning his resolve.

  “Please, you have to find the story.”

  David cursed. He saw the hobo the same time as the stench hit his nostrils. “Fuck me, why are you hounding me?”

  “Please, tell the story.” Mutter mutter.

  David shook his head. This was weird and disturbing and he really had no idea what he was supposed to do for this man. But the situation obviously wasn’t going away. “What’s your name, buddy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  Mutter mutter.

  David shrugged. “Well, I have to call you something. Why don’t you pick a name.”

  Mutter mutter.

  “Fuck me. All right, how about Boris? You like that?”

  “I don’t know what it means.”

  David laughed. “Neither do I, Boris, neither do I. But if you can’t come up with anything better, that’s what I’m going to call you from now on. Now, Boris, what the fuck do you want? Really?”

  “I’m sure I have a story. You can tell it.” Mutter mutter.

  David narrowed his eyes, trying to understand. “Tell me more. Tell me what you want.” A hazy memory stumbled through the fog in his brain. “You said something about some people being like me and some people being like you?”

  The hazel eyes popped wide. “Yes! That’s right. Some are like you and some are like me.”

  David stopped looking at Boris, avoiding the incessant lips. For some reason it was even more disturbing now that he knew Boris was just repeating the Lord’s Prayer over and over and over. “What does that mean?” he asked. “What’s the difference between you and me?”

  Boris tilted his head to one side. “Memories,” he said, as if it was obvious. “Some people are like you, broken and lost, but they remember. Some are like me.”

  “You have no memories?”

  “Bits and pieces, images and sounds. But nothing really. I don’t know anything about me. But you can see and you can find stories.”

  There was something in what Boris said that tickled the investigative reporter nerves deep inside David. Maybe this poor, mad hobo could lead David to a story that would stamp his name on the world. Perhaps it could even lead to promotions, more money, reconciliation with Stella and his boys. He stopped dead, his eyes widening. What the fuck was he thinking? Why would his life suddenly become a Time Life drama with a happy ending? He must be as mad as Boris.

  But it was possible that there was a story here. Besides, this nutcase was obviously going to keep harassing him until he found out. And he was reminded of another question that bothered him. “How do you keep finding me?”

  “I can see your light. I want to go to you and I do.”

  David raised his eyebrows. “Really?”

  Mutter mutter.

  “All right then. You know some other people like you? People without memories? Can you take me to them?”

  Boris smiled and his face was beatific, glowing through his grime. “Yes!”

  He turned and walked off along the pavement. David let out a tiny laugh and hurried to catch up. Within a few paces Boris vanished. David froze, staring at the space where the homeless man had stood. His odour, sour and rich, still hung in the air. “What the fuck . . . ?”

  He looked around. Not many people were travelling this footpath, and no one seemed to have noticed a man disappear. He turned slowly on the spot, looking all around. As he completed his circle his nostrils filled with foulness and he shouted in surprise.

  Boris stood there, looking confused. “You want me to show you? Follow me.”

  “I tried, but you disappeared. How did you do that? What did you do, exactly?”

  “I went to a place to show you a man with no memory.”

  “I can’t do that,” David said slowly. “Can we walk there?”

  Boris narrowed his eyes, muttering frantically. “All right,” he said eventually. He turned and walked off again.

  David fell into step beside him, watching closely. “Is it far?”

  “Not far. Further like this, but not far.”

  They walked for block after block, and David wondered just what Boris might consider far to mean. Eventually they reached Chinatown. On the corner of Sussex and Goulburn Streets, Boris stopped, staring
ahead, still muttering. Though the pavements were busy with foot traffic, a buffer zone of half a metre remained around them. David wondered if the stench that hung around this man wasn’t a considered defensive tactic. Maybe David should stop bathing. “Why have we stopped?”

  Boris pointed up Goulburn Street, towards the corner with George. “He’s coming.”

  David scanned the crowded pathways, looking for someone like the poor wretch who stood beside him. After a moment a small, bearded man with a mop of dreadlocks welded together with greasy dirt appeared around the corner. He walked along the edge of the path, one foot on the kerb, the other in the gutter. He was chattering away, his mouth and beard dancing a frenzied tango. Every few paces he would lift his knee and stamp into the gutter as hard as he could, shouting, before continuing the walking and chattering. People on the path gave him a wide berth too, casting sidelong glances, some disgusted, some compassionate. “What’s his name?” David asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  David crossed the street, standing on the kerb to intercept the dreadlocked stamper. Only a metre away, Dreads stamped and shouted, his words incoherent. David winced, wondering how much damage the man was doing to his foot, with his shoe a ragged trainer, split and falling apart. Dreads stopped when he realised David was standing there, looked up sharply. His eyes were wild and scared.

  “Don’t worry, mate. I wanted to talk to you. Is that okay? What’s your name?”

  Dreads spotted Boris across the street and hissed, his face twisting in rage.

  “What’s your name, mate?”

  He turned back to David, his nose wrinkled like a child pretending to be a tiger. “Ain’t got a name.” His voice was thirty years of drinking meths and smoking butts.

  “You don’t have one or you can’t remember?”

  “Same thing.”

  “What can you remember? Why are you on the streets?”

  Still snarling, the man tipped his head to one side like Boris had earlier. “Why?”

  “Do you remember where you grew up?”

  “Grew up? What do you mean?”

  David paused, unsure. “Do you remember anything about your life before you were living on the streets?”

  Dreads put one hand into the middle of David’s chest and shoved him out of the way. He stamped in the gutter, striding on before David could say anything else. Every few metres he lifted his knee and stamped again, until he turned into Sussex Street and stamp-walked out of sight.

  David drew a long breath. It was generally well known, though rather less well talked about, that the majority of people living on the streets were suffering from one form of mental illness or another. Most people who were able to operate within society did just that, and the misfits and weirdos ended up homeless. But they weren’t weirdos so much as sick, with no one to care for them, to get them the help they needed. David grimaced. Sometimes people weren’t very advanced as a species at all, a thin veneer of civilisation barely covering a plethora of failures and atrocities. Maybe it was as simple as that, and these people were more broken in their minds than most. But something still niggled at David’s journalistic core. And Boris’s disappearing act couldn’t be ignored.

  David knew from bitter experience that there was lot more to life than most people ever considered. The fairy tales and ghost stories, maybe a lot of that stuff was true. He had recently seen and done more than he would ever have considered possible before, and a disappearing man, while mind blowing on one level, was something he was prepared to accept. But it also helped to convince him that these people weren’t simply deranged. Something was going on here.

  Another homeless man sat on the opposite corner of Goulburn and George, a hand-written cardboard sign in his lap, a ragged cap on the pavement in front of him. His head hung, eyes downcast, a picture of misery. David jogged between beeping traffic and walked up the street. He crouched, dropping a couple of dollars into the man’s hat. “What happened to you, mate?”

  The man’s his eyes hung under the weight of his sadness. “What?”

  “How did you end up on the street?”

  “Got taken away from my parents, put into care, and didn’t like it. I left for the big city and here I am.” He pointed at his cardboard sign. Homeless and jobless, just looking for a start in life. Please help. God Bless.

  There was a struggle behind this guy’s eyes. He was an angry, broken person, certainly depressed, probably suffering something more complicated, with no one to help him. He was an example of the detritus of humanity, and he was different from Boris and Dreads. Very different, though David couldn’t really put his finger on why. “Well, best of luck, buddy.”

  He stood and returned to Boris. “I don’t really know what this story is that you want me to tell, but I’ll try. You have any idea where I might start?”

  Boris just looked at him, muttering away.

  “You’re a bit different,” David said. “You know that you can’t remember anything. That stamping guy seemed confused that I was even asking.”

  “I can remember that I can’t remember, so something must be happening. I’m watching for it.”

  David pushed the thought of a drink into the back of his mind. Maybe this is what he had needed all along, something really intriguing to get his teeth into. “How many people are there like you?” he asked Boris.

  “Like me?”

  “People who don’t remember.” He indicated the man with the cap and the cardboard sign. “He’s like you, but different, right?”

  “Yes, he’s like you.”

  David raised an eyebrow. He wasn’t sure he liked that comparison. “But that guy stamping in the gutter. He’s like you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how many others do you know like that? Like you.”

  Boris shrugged. “Some. I’m the only watcher.”

  “Can you show me another one?”

  “There’s one at the Mission.”

  A few minutes later they stood in front of the Mission Australia Centre. A man with long pale hair and even paler skin crouched on the pavement outside, his back against a wall. “He lives inside as often as he can and spends all day here,” Boris said.

  David crouched in front of the pale man. “Hello.”

  Nothing.

  “What’s your name, mate?”

  The pale man’s eyes focussed on David’s face. “No name.” His voice was as light as a wisp of cobweb on the air.

  David leaned closer. “How did you end up here?”

  “How what?”

  “On the street. What happened to you?”

  The question appeared to make no sense to him. His gaze slid away, staring through David into the depths of nowhere.

  David stood. “Can you show me anything?” he asked Boris. “You said you had snippets of images and sounds. Are they like fragments of memories? Is that the difference between you and these others like you?”

  Boris nodded, lips gibbering.

  “What do you remember? What images?”

  “There’s a place that feels familiar.”

  “Take me there.”

  The close heat of the summer night made walking sweaty. David’s shirt stuck to him, stained at the armpits, back and chest. He was tired and irritable, but his intrigue kept him going. The thought of an air-conditioned pub and an ice cold beer kept surfacing. He pushed it down time and again, knowing it would only pop back up as soon as his thoughts wandered. They walked past Central station and up into Surry Hills, turning off Foveaux Street into a network of narrow lanes and alleys. Boris stopped at the end of one. The left side was all brick walls and boarded-up windows. The right side had roller doors with dirty windows above. Rubbish littered the gutters, a dead rat, dried out and paper thin, pressed into the bitumen in front of them.

  “This it?”

  Boris nodded, his muttering more frantic, almost audible.

  “What is it about this place?” David asked.

  “It’s fam
iliar. Something happened here. Or something will. It’s important.”

  Boris didn’t move, repeating his prayer as fast as he could. David walked up the alley warily. “Come on, walk with me. Tell me what you feel.”

  Boris entered the alley, his steps heavy, hesitant.

  “Let’s just walk to the other end. Tell me what you think,” David said.

  The alley sloped gently upwards for a couple of hundred metres, getting steeper for the last thirty metres or so. They walked slowly, Boris praying ever more desperately until the words merged and blurred. As they reached the steepest incline, a man in a dark suit stepped into the alley. Boris stopped dead in his tracks, his mouth still, his voice silent. David walked on a few paces. “Hey there,” he called out.

  The Suit approached them casually. A sense of dread draped over David. The Suit’s colours were too bright to see clearly, all power and confidence, giving nothing else away. Both men were silent, stock still, eyes locked. David felt like he wasn’t even there.

  “I’m David Johanssen.” His voice sounded reedy.

  The Suit’s eyes met David’s. “I know who you are.”

  “Do you? Doesn’t feel very fair given that I don’t know who you are.”

  The man smiled, a predatory baring of teeth. “David Johanssen, second rate reporter, failed marriage, two boys, ten and twelve, both of whom despise you.”

  David’s knees began to tremble and his balls tightened. The need to drink was suddenly ferocious.

  “Alcoholic,” The Suit continued. “You played around with magic and got burned. Now you’ve lost everything and you’re desperate for some kind of repentant catharsis. This, I’m afraid, isn’t it.”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Let’s just say that I’m a company man, here to take care of some business.”

  “Company? What fucking company?”

  The man drew out a shining black automatic pistol and shot Boris in the head. The concussion rang off the alley walls, driving iron stakes into David’s ears. Boris stood, eyes wide, a dark red hole in the middle of his forehead leaking a single line of blood over the bridge of his nose. The back of his head had blown open like a sharp, bony flower. He folded to the ground.