No Safe Place

by Jenny Spence

  NO SAFE

  PLACE

  JENNY SPENCE

  First published in 2013

  Copyright © Jenny Spence 2013

  Excerpts from T.S. Eliot are reproduced with the permission of Faber and Faber Ltd publishers.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Arena Books, an imprint of

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 332 9

  eISBN 978 1 74343 454 3

  Internal design by Lisa White

  Set in 12.5/19 pt Minion by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  For my mother,

  Patricia Maie Walsh 1915–2005

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  Acknowledgements

  1

  I wake at dawn to the call of a lone magpie. The breeze through the open window bites, and I pull the covers over my head and wish my way to Canton Creek, where the birds sing all day. If I lived at Canton Creek I might be someone who rises at dawn to go running over the stony ridges, scaring up kangaroos and cockatoos, my breath making little white clouds in the frosty air. Or maybe I would sleep late, waiting for the sun to creep through the stained-glass windows of my hand-made house. Either way, I would be answerable to no-one.

  This city is full of people like me who dream of escape. My parents and their optimistic friends thought they could get there. They formed what they grandly called a collective and bought a hundred hectares of scrubby land, goldfields land, where the soil is thin and poor and the rain can hold off for years. Now I’ve inherited their share in Canton Creek, and it’s my turn to dream as I drift through the long weeks and short weekends, neglecting housework and bookkeeping in equal measure, nagging my daughter Miranda to get her life organised, wondering when I’ll ever be free to live the way I want.

  In my fantasy life at Canton Creek I would spring out of bed on winter mornings and stoke up the firebox, still aglow from the previous night, my brain buzzing with ideas for the great novel I would be writing. There would be no Soft Serve Solutions, no boss like Derek Sing, and especially – I groan inwardly when I think of what Monday morning has in store for me – no Surinder Kaur.

  My reverie is interrupted by the click of the front door, and I automatically glance over at the clock by my bed. Six-twenty. Relief swamps me as I realise that I’ve been half-awake for hours, listening for that click. My night has been haunted by visions of Miranda, stepping out uncertainly from some bar onto the streets of Brunswick, tracked on her wavering path home by hostile eyes. But even as I let go of my fear it’s replaced by annoyance with her for staying out so late. Now she’ll sleep all day and leave me to do the house-cleaning, as usual.

  Ah well, at least when Miranda sleeps all day I have the place to myself and can do what I please. Yesterday I even did some shopping and had lunch with my oldest friend, Carol, who with four kids and all their commitments rarely has time to catch up.

  I can’t get back to sleep, so I sit up and contemplate my Sunday. There’s a layer of grime on everything, and I doubt Miranda’s even thought about washing her clothes and packing. Months ago my unpredictable daughter nominated to do this term’s teaching prac unit at a country school. Now she’s got cold feet about spending two weeks out of the city, but it’s too late to change her mind and she’s supposed to be driving my car – another great knot of worry lands in my stomach – down to Augusta Creek today.

  Miranda’s natural enthusiasm will kick in once she gets there, but like many urban kids she has a terror of country towns, imagining they won’t have heard of espresso coffee, rap music or Pink.

  How about that, I think, noticing that she’s dragged out all her dirty clothes and sorted them into piles for me. Very thoughtful. I step over one of the piles and turn on the shower. It’d teach her a lesson if I ignored them and she had to go off to the country without any clean clothes. It’s time she grew up.

  But all along I know that after my shower I’ll start the washing off for her. It’s either that or tackle the pile of documents I need to go through for my horribly overdue tax return.

  My mind rebels and strays once again to Canton Creek, where in my fantasy life I’d be outside the tax system and Miranda would be transformed into an idyllic daughter, serious and responsible, with a nice boyfriend who delivers her home, with old-fashioned courtesy, well before midnight.

  2

  It’s Monday morning and monochrome commuters cluster at the tram stop. The grey sky is reflected in the slick grey surface of the road. It’s a John Brack painting, except for the mobile phones pressed to everyone’s ear. There’s a cheerful ding as the tram bears down on us.

  I find a seat facing forward near the front, and sit down. The girl next to me is perched on the edge of her seat, her knees gripping a yellow fibreglass cello case. She is so close I can see faint streaks of grime on her neck and the coarse pores of her plump cheeks. If Renoir were to hurtle through a time warp and see her he would be entranced by the unexpected grace with which she lifts both arms to gather her heavy dark hair and wind it into a knot, revealing a soft white neck. For a moment the generous lines of her body mimic the curves of her cello case. The advertising stickers on it pick up the strong contrasting colours in her cheap blue and purple fleecy jacket. Renoir would be yearning for his palette.

  I think a lot about artists. In my dream life at Canton Creek I would be writing a book about Vermeer. My favourite Vermeer paintings are like scenes from a story. Beautiful, unpretentious domestic situations, glowing with colour, with something mysterious going on just outside the frame. Vermeer’s own story is just as tantalising, as so little is known about him.

  The tram pulls to a stop at Bourke Street and we all lurch to our feet. As the girl leans forward to pick up her cello, her too-short jacket slides up to reveal mottled white flesh and buttock cleavage, below a broad yellow belt which balances the glow of her cello case. Gauguin materialises beside Renoir, and they chatter excitedly. Then the crowd closes like the Red Sea. Girl and cello are gone.

>   I need to make a couple of calls this morning, which means I can put off the moment when the office swallows me up. I make my way towards the glossy high-rise building that houses the Department of Water Resources and make a call to reception. Surinder Kaur comes down to the lobby to sign me in. We fuss around with security badges, then make small talk in the lift.

  As usual Surinder, impeccably dressed in a western style business suit with a bright sea-green shirt, makes me feel shabby, even though I’m wearing my good black pants and a new beige cashmere jumper. The colour of the jumper suddenly looks drab. I never see clothes like Surinder’s in the shops I can afford, and I suspect she gets them hand-made for her in India. Half a head shorter than me, and much slighter, she has a vivid, pretty face and a glossy black braid that hangs below her waist. Her eyes, today, are also sea-green, and I have to remind myself not to gaze into them. She has several pairs of jewel-coloured contact lenses which she wears with matching shirts, and I find them oddly disconcerting.

  Surinder is a perfect bureaucrat: smart, ambitious and good at getting her own way in meetings. We treat each other with guarded respect, both slightly baffled by the other’s job. Over the last couple of years I’ve transformed her section’s incoherent procedure documents into a simple, logical information system which her staff are supposed to be maintaining. However neither they nor Surinder seem to be able to get their heads around it. The idea is to achieve what’s laughingly called a paperless office. We go into a meeting room, where a pile of printouts is sitting on a table, and I eye them apprehensively.

  “Just a few changes, Elly,” Surinder says encouragingly. “We think maybe two, three weeks’ work?”

  “You should be making the changes yourselves. That’s what all the training I gave you was for,” I murmur, wishing I could forget said training session at which the audience muttered disconsolately while Surinder smiled and nodded enthusiastically at the back of the room.

  “We’re so happy with your system we think it’d be a pity to mess it up – much better if you look after it,” says Surinder, her eyes flashing green as the contact lenses catch the light. “All the new information is here – and I have budget approval.”

  She inclines her head towards the printouts. They must have dredged up the old files and edited them, and I know from past experience that the job of sorting out the bad English and moving it all into the new system once more will be mind-numbing. I can just see Derek, my boss, rubbing his hands with glee at the thought of how much he can charge them.

  I’d intended to go straight to my next appointment after Water Resources, but I’m so frustrated I catch a tram down Bourke Street to our office. Soft Serve Solutions is on the second floor of a seedy building just off Spencer Street. Derek is on the phone as usual, and when I catch his eye through the glass partition and mime talking he holds up fingers to indicate that he can see me at eleven o’clock. I’ll just have to wait.

  Derek puts teams of specialists into organisations that prefer to outsource their IT. Some of the work that’s generated is back at the office, where the programmers develop and update customised software. My main job is to make sense of what they’ve done and write it all up. Most of the programmers are half my age, and they’re late starters, so there aren’t many people in the office. A few can be found in the lunch room, eating cereal and flicking through The Age. I make myself a coffee and let their talk, peppered with acronyms, wash soothingly over me until Derek looks in and tells me he’s free.

  I follow him to his office and shut the door behind me. “I quit,” I announce.

  “Okay, okay,” he says. “Unless?”

  “No more Department of Water Resources, or whatever they’re calling themselves today,” I say. This particular department is always splitting, reforming and restructuring, and has had half a dozen names since I started working for it.

  Derek’s smooth Chinese face doesn’t change. We both know this is an ambit claim.

  “Well, okay,” I relent a little. “At least get me a sub-contractor. You can get someone to do their shit-work for even less than the pittance you’re paying me.”

  “I suppose that make sense,” he concedes.

  “Plus,” I add hastily,realising I haven’t pushed him hard enough, “you’ve got to give me some better work than this. I’m supposed to be a technical writer. That means writing stuff, not dealing with all this other crap.”

  His eyes on the computer screen, it’s obvious he’s scrolling through emails.

  “Hmm,” he says. “There’s this job in Sydney. Maybe . . . no, sorry. Not writing.”

  “Sydney?” He’s playing me like a violin, I know. “What would I be doing?”

  “It’s another government job. But you said no more government work.”

  “Derek!”

  “All right, only semi-government anyway, editing some development application. Environmental impact, that sort of thing. Coal industry. You’d have to be up there for a couple of weeks.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Derek. Who were you going to give this to?”

  “I was thinking maybe sub-contractor, someone based in Sydney,” he admits.

  “You could have mentioned it,” I say, huffily.

  “Well, just thought . . .” He’s on the defensive now. “There’s your daughter . . .”

  “She’s twenty-one, Derek. Forward the email to me and I’ll consider it,” I say before stalking out of his office, hardly more mollified than when I went in.

  But still. Sydney!

  3

  It’s stopped raining and there’s some sunshine outside now, so I decide to walk to my next job. Leaving my raincoat at the office, I stride past the green haze of the Flagstaff Gardens and make my way to the narrow back street in West Melbourne where Carlos Fitzwilliam lives and works. Carlos is the star of Soft Serve, a brilliant programmer who works entirely on his own terms. Carlos wouldn’t be his original name – neither would Fitzwilliam, for that matter. Like many of his tribe he has made himself an avatar for real life, something like the avatars he uses in game-playing.

  The battered-looking door of the converted leather factory is three inches of solid steel. Carlos fears invasion and he’s got a lot of up-to-the-minute electronic equipment he doesn’t want to be stolen. I hate to think what he paid for it all. The door swings silently open as I approach it. Carlos would have known I was coming as soon as I turned into the street. He might even have tracked me all the way from my office.

  As I enter he waddles over to greet me holding a steaming latte from his industrial-strength coffee machine in one hand and a brioche from our favourite French bakery in the other.

  Inside, it’s clean, white and bare. Apart from the minimalist kitchen, and a bathroom somewhere, the building is one big space: long, high and a bit wider than the average terrace house. Tall glass doors at the back lead out onto a tiny brick-paved yard with access to a lane. Carlos opened the doors for me once when I insisted on putting some stuff in the recycling bin, but I don’t think he ever goes out there himself. When I tell him he should try to breathe real air now and again, even get some sun on that dead-white skin, he just gives me a funny look, eyebrows raised and lips pursed, and changes the subject.

  The apartment itself could be sunny and pleasant if he allowed it, but he keeps all the doors and windows bolted and the blinds pulled right down, relying on skylights and halogens for the limited light he needs.

  This place is perfect for Carlos, with every surface taken up by computers and related equipment. Even the enormous television screen is likely to be displaying lines of scrolling code, with whatever movie Carlos is watching banished to a small display in the corner. Carlos barely distinguishes between his paid work, mostly writing and adapting software for Derek’s clients, and the electronic games he plays. Like all my programmer colleagues, he plays complicated adventure games as though his life depended on the outcome.

  A separate array of screens reveals what Carlos takes most seriously
of all, and how he knew when I’d be arriving. Carlos has somehow devised a program allowing him to run feeds from numerous CCTV cameras around the city through his main computer. The screens show endless flickering streets and building lobbies, with icons that flash whenever something unexpected happens. Several twenty-four-hour news broadcasts run soundlessly in separate windows on another screen, and there are tabular displays of data, most of it incomprehensible, endlessly rolling through a couple more.

  With all of its expensive equipment, along with tales of Carlos’s legendary programming skills, my colleagues think this place sounds like paradise and are horribly envious whenever I tell them I’m coming here. Most of them haven’t seen it, except in the background on Webcam, because Carlos doesn’t welcome visitors. I don’t think anyone is allowed in besides me, Derek and his lifelines: the people who deliver food and the grave Korean couple who come once a week to clean the place from top to bottom while he hovers unhappily nearby.

  My colleagues haven’t seen Carlos in corporeal form either, because Carlos doesn’t go out. Ever.

  I used to find Carlos a little spooky. He seemed to know everything about me before I knew it myself. When I mentioned I’d bought a new laptop, he said: “I don’t know why you keep buying Dells. You should let me build you a laptop.” And I hadn’t even mentioned the brand. Similarly, when we started working together and I said something about living in Brunswick, he said: “Some of those little streets in Brunswick are nice. You’re in one of the best parts.”

  Now I’ve got to know him better it doesn’t seem so strange, because Carlos checks up on everyone, particularly the rare few people he allows into his sanctuary, but it’s still a bit weird to feel him looking over my shoulder, so to speak, whenever I do anything that leaves an electronic trail.

  I wouldn’t say it, but I think there’s more than self-preservation in the way Carlos keeps tabs on me, the way his eyes follow my every move when I’m at his apartment, the solicitous hand he places lightly on my back as he ushers me to a comfortable seat in front of his largest computer screen. He’s about my age but looks ten years older. His hair, greying and thinning, is tied back in a scrawny ponytail, but his brown eyes are gentle and, for all his paranoia, guileless. Every time I’ve seen him he’s been dressed the same way, in a baggy black t-shirt and shapeless black jeans. And from the sour smell that emanates from him he doesn’t seem to have many changes of that outfit. The company pays him huge amounts of money, in line with his value, but I guess he only spends it on things that matter to him.