Black Rock White City

by A. S. Patric

  Dickens is stumbling back as the Irish Wolfhound emerges from a possum hunt in Jovan’s backyard. The psychologist falls onto his bruised coccyx with a yelp.

  Charlemagne stops and looks up at Jovan as if to ask, What’s the deal with this guy?

  “This is friendly Carlo. He won’t make you any pain,” Jovan tells David.

  “Jittery, I suppose, after what happened. And I won’t sleep tonight,” Dickens says getting back to his feet. “I keep forgetting how addictive coffee really is. It’s the commonplace nature …”

  “You did not come for this,” Jovan says. The Irish Wolfhound stands beside Jovan, leaning on him. A hand unconsciously reaches down and plays with the folds of skin at the dog’s throat.

  Dickens looks at the two of them, rubbing his lips with the back of his hand, and then says, “I take it you’ve heard about the optometrist.”

  “Yes. Very sorry for her,” Jovan felt little about the incident. Having spoken now though, feels the words thump into his heart, the ghost of a train suddenly rattling through with all its carriages and then vanishing and leaving him feeling the same kind of nothingness again. That feeling was the lie. The truth was the train, loaded not only with Miss Richards and her small sad decision on the Hallam platform, but with others seen through the glass, blurred with reflections of Jovan and Suzana, and so many others still waiting at the station. The numbness of a long wait.

  Purgatory is a nothing, fear is a nothing, love is a nothing

  Dickens leans forward, reaching out a tentative hand to Charlemagne. “We can’t attribute the action entirely to her exposure to the graffiti. Clearly a tipping point was reached.” A drizzle begins to descend in a mist, evaporating before it gets to the ground, warm from the day.

  “Was it killing herself? Maybe she fall over. Or something else. Pushed by accident.” They move beneath the foliage of a silver dollar eucalyptus growing in Jovan’s front yard.

  “Did you see the eye charts?” Dickens asks.

  “Yes.”

  Dickens blinks, “Do you have the eye charts?”

  Jovan nods.

  “Is it possible from what you saw? Intentional, not accidental.”

  Jovan shakes his head. “I am very surprised.”

  “Is it as simple as reading the message? Perhaps it was a part of it. What about the invasive nature of the act—the particularity of it. Everything else so far has been broad range. For anyone that came across it. Here we have a specific target for a message. And that target is dead a few days later. It certainly seems a related sequence. What do you think?”

  “He knows her very well.” Jovan shrugs, feeling tired and dazed. “Maybe. But he does not push. He has an instinct for how to find pain. This doctor with needles.”

  “Acupuncturist.”

  “He finds the nerve that hurts most and uses needle for ice.”

  “Ice pick.”

  “He is not planning the place like Hallam. He is not a mastermind from a bad grade film.”

  “B Grade. There’s A Grade and there’s … whatever. It’s not Bad Grade.”

  “Enough with help. If you understand, nod your head. Or keep your mouth close for more than a minute. You don’t catch flies in your mouth.”

  “Sure. Sorry.” Dickens rubs the hand that touched the dog on his pant leg. “I would very much like to see the eye charts, if that’s convenient for you at all.”

  A few moments ago Jovan had been in his bedroom. Dealing with a chattering psychologist sky-high on caffeine wasn’t a pleasant way to wake up.

  “As well as the eye charts, she find the body with the message cut in chest. Maybe this have effects,” Jovan says.

  “You didn’t see the Inspiration cadaver yourself?”

  “No.”

  “Did they take pictures?”

  “What you think?”

  “Of course.” Dickens squints in embarrassment. “I didn’t know the optometrist found the cadaver. Do you think that’s what made her Graffito’s next target?”

  “Yes. Maybe.” Jovan tilts his head back to stretch his neck and take a breath of air. He wobbles his head left and right, blinking as though he’s just woken. “Trying to understand crazy can make the crazy.” He plucks a eucalyptus leaf and brings it to his nose. A lovely smell.

  Dickens doesn’t blink or move his head. He keeps himself very still and focused. “How did she respond to finding that woman’s body?”

  Jovan exhales loudly, exasperated.

  “I know it sounds like an interrogation. I’m not just asking questions. I’m very interested in your thoughts. There’s a part of me that can’t believe a woman killed herself over some graffiti. A bit of vandalism. But there’s the cadaver, and you have to call that carved word a desecration. So that makes more sense. Did you see Richards after discovering that body?”

  “Miss Richards always quiet. Everything was in tight jar. I think she acts like doctor, but she not surgeon and a dead body for the optometrist is dead body for the suburban person. I never see a word made into a human body this way. How do we respond? Maybe there is no respond to this.” Jovan rubs the back of his neck as he speaks, pauses as he asks his question, and then lets his arm drop.

  David Dickens pats the giant dog’s head very lightly, pretending to touch him as much as anything, “I might write a book about these events. I’ve even made a start. It’s early days and there’s many a project I begin … but you can never tell which will carry you all the way through to the end. I thought the best way to tackle this story would be from his perspective. Dr Graffito’s eyes. Of course, I have nowhere near enough information, but we’ll see how we go. The event is in progress and it’s going to be interesting to see who this man is. One thing’s for certain: he will not stop. The evidence of his behaviour indicates a deeply compulsive personality that is only becoming more obsessive with time. Sedation and restraint is all that might be recommended. So, he will be caught. Eventually. I might get a chance to talk to him. Maybe Graffito is a way for me to investigate a range of ideas I’m already exploring, but he might also end up being the way to crystallise what I’ve been working towards for years. I can show you the intro and you can give me your opinion.”

  “My opinion?”

  “I mean your professional opinion.” David leans forward, arms slightly raised, suggesting an actor might emerge from the wings onto a stage. “As a professor of literature in Yugoslavia you must have assessed many a manuscript.”

  “Not now. No more professional anything. I understand talking much more better than reading, especially with technical word. This way he looks …”

  “Perspective,” David fills in, then raises a hand in apology.

  “It is impossible for you maybe. Where does he look from? How does he look? And what you could speak for him, comes from easy explanation you have already prepared. This is … just you again. Not a new perspective.”

  “I think I can find a different perspective. I don’t want to shrink him into some easy categorisation. I want to try to understand him. See if I can …”

  “The rain is falling from a full moon,” Silvers says. “The water wets my face but I haven’t been crying.”

  Silvers has returned to the yard after having watched the rain sifting across the lawns of his neighbourhood. Watering the grass wasn’t necessary after all and he hasn’t been called a ‘fucking mental’, ‘stupid fuck’ or ‘dumb shit’ and hasn’t been pushed away by any of the more territorial neighbours who don’t want him touching their hoses or water to save their grass.

  The full moon is clear even though the sky is still more blue than black. Silvers stands among the men as though to join the conversation, not paying attention to what they’re saying. He’s pleased to hear their voices engaged on some subject of apparent substance.

  “Round moon in the blue sky,” he says again, into a brief pause in the two men’s voices. “I hammer it in with my eye. The head of a big nail.”

  A car coasts up the drive
. Jovan’s wife. The pretty lady that gives Silvers food she cooks herself—who has a cutting voice and hard sharp eyes as though she found them in broken beer bottles. Even when she smiles at him, or at his Charlemagne, or at her husband, the big man with hands twice the size of his own. The woman who never looks afraid of anything, even when he had to bring her over to the house because his Janey was so sick she couldn’t get out of bed, and couldn’t make him anything to eat, or even call on the phone for people to bring around food and Silvers had already eaten all the bread and cereal in the house. This woman with the broken-glass eyes came and made everything alright again. As though she was changing the bed. She called the ambulance and Janey came back because it had been a mild heart attack. Now Janey was always resting and she promised she would live to be a hundred and one. Silvers worries that she might not be telling him the truth and he doesn’t want to ask Mister Jovan’s wife for help every day, even though she was very nice, because he doesn’t want to look at those eyes.

  Charlemagne barks and Jovan sees Mrs Silvers making her way over. To collect her ‘two strays’. At the same time Jovan sees a sleek new SAAB roll up behind the Datsun that Dickens owns. Tammie sits behind her steering wheel, smiling at the sample of the local community here in Frankston. She gets out of the car and walks towards them.

  “Hello there. I think I’m a little lost. Not used to driving around the boondocks I suppose. I was wondering if anyone can help me. I’m looking to get to the Church of Christ. Do any of you know where it is?”

  She’s looking at Jovan when she asks. He lifts the shovel that he’s been leaning on, but remains silent, watching her and the smile snaking around her mouth. Jovan smiles despite himself. It’s a good joke: The Church of Christ.

  Silvers is pointing up at the moon by way of comment. He says, “It would hurt more. This kind of bright round moon. No sleep on the cross. A dark night would be better. The iron nails can not disappear when there’s no darkness.”

  Charlemagne trots over to Tammie. She gives the dog a whack on the snout with the back of her hand. A hard hit showing experience with animals and discipline.

  Suzana lifts the bags of shopping she’d put on the ground and Dickens takes it upon himself to help the woman. He moves out to the kerb and begins pointing out directions and estimates of travel time.

  “I’m surprised you need the address at this time of night,” Dickens says. “They’re closed right now, aren’t they? Though I don’t suppose it’s like a hairdresser or haberdashery. Actually, you must have passed it coming here, down Cranbourne Street. It’s the one with a needle on the roof. Don’t ask me why it’s a needle. Perhaps it’s a directional needle. A symbolic gesture reminding us of the Assumption or the struggling soul’s aspiration in general—”

  “Thanks.” She slaps Dickens on the shoulder. Hard enough that it barely qualifies as a friendly pat. “I appreciate the directions.”

  “Still, what could you possibly want at the church at eight in the evening?” asks Dickens with a polite smile.

  Tammie tilts her face forward, closing her eyes. “That’s between me and Jesus.” She waves at the group of people gathered in Jovan’s front yard without looking at them again. “Shame you’re holding a shovel. If it was a pitch fork we could call this lovely little tableau Australian Gothic,” she tells Jovan, before she gets back into her silver bullet of a car.

  Suzana whispers something into the cup of Jovan’s ear, and walks into the house with the shopping.

  Silvers is dragged away by his wife, announcing before he leaves, “It’s a shame we don’t all live to a hundred and one years.”

  Dickens returns to the motionless Jovan and continues talking about the ideas he has for his new book. The Graffiti Artist of the Caves might be a good title, Dickens says and goes on for half an hour without noticing that Jovan isn’t listening to a word he’s saying.

  Monday morning Jovan drives from the dentist to the hospital, pain in his jaw, knowing now that he’ll need seven fillings. Rescheduled to go in for some drilling Friday. Lucky, they tell him, to get in so quickly. A cancellation, and it could have been a month’s wait instead, and who knows, maybe another cavity. As it was, lucky number seven. Every time he got fillings they took six months to settle in, and there was no feeling lucky about any of it, anywhere in the process. Well, at least he hadn’t taken a fall down the stairs as had the Caffeine Wood Spider.

  He is forced to manhandle the van, leaning into the column shift, and swinging the metal crate of a vehicle this way and that, through the alternating gliding/grinding traffic. The brakes are still spongy. Gearing down to stops whenever he can.

  David Dickens hadn’t fallen down the stairs. Jovan hadn’t believed that when Dickens told the story, though he’d accepted it in the wild flow of the man’s words yesterday. The over-elaborate lie that students had tried on Jovan in the past so many times, going to ridiculous lengths to explain a late assignment. He pulls his van in and out of the combative lines of traffic.

  Because another thing Dickens had talked about last night was the kind of graffiti he’d seen on trains, under bridges, on brick walls along the tracks and at train stations, and what it meant to desperately need to scrawl your name across concrete, rhapsodising about the liquid vision passing across those words and images, as though witnessing a river drowning all in a rushing anonymity. Generating questions: why did oblivion of this kind hurt? Why did it force these boys out to the desolate concrete near the gleaming steel rails of a rapidly passing world?

  Jovan considers Frankston station and what it’s like late at night. When Dickens did his research for The Graffiti Artist of the Caves. A book that was (metaphorically speaking) also graffiti scrawled beside the tracks, ‘and as much a response to the hurt as it is for those lost boys buying their cans of paint,’ Dickens said after dinner as they walked to Jovan’s garage to see Graffito’s plates and charts.

  The man with careful glasses set on his nose; those inquisitive eyes; those hippy clothes; crawled up into a ball as the youths of oblivion kicked into his legs and arms and back. Booting into the sag of an aging body. Kicking into his bald head to see it bounce. Had anyone ever really fallen down the stairs or collided with a door handle when explaining their bruises?

  These thoughts shove away from Dickens and those boots crashing into his body and push instead into the traffic he’s trying to get through.

  Written across the chalkboard-black streets is the mathematics of chaos. Everyone going off in a million directions, scrawling their intentions in Morse code flashes and dashes, behind glass hissing at each other in the lost languages of silence, sometimes colliding and crashing into each other, mostly passing untouched across the unalterable long black mark of a destiny road through an anonymous fate.

  Thinking about chaos again, and the difference between fate and destiny. Jovan wonders if he is affected by Dr Graffito in the same way Miss Richards was. Not so simple an act of destruction. Something at least; not knowing where this will eventually lead him.

  Jovan gets out of his white Ford panel van and walks through the hospital car park. He rarely spots anyone he knows from Bosnia. It seems an impossibility that someone from the life over there might pop up all the way over here in Melbourne, though it’s happened a few times. His hand is raised to the side of his sore jaw to dampen the jolts of every step. He doesn’t pay much attention to the woman pulling along a reluctant five-year-old across the shimmering concrete. He remembers how difficult it had been to go to a supermarket or get on public transport with children. Any kind of movement became a matter of logistics. A child isn’t a sack of potatoes you can throw over your shoulder, dumping it here or there. They need to be coaxed every step of the way. Their opinions of the heat taken into account. Their distress negotiated. So he smiles at the woman yet doesn’t recognise her from Sarajevo.

  Silvana Pejich passes Professor Brakochevich. His smile reaches her with the force of a full-blooded slap as they pass. Manages to keep
walking. Doesn’t turn around. It hasn’t been a good day for her. The bleeding over the last two weeks was the initial stages of a miscarriage, though the doctor hadn’t put it that way exactly. The obstetrician was very clear in other ways. A strict recommendation for bed rest. In effect, saying that she should stay in bed for the next six months. Impossible of course. Two wages kept them all barely afloat as it was. She feels damp. Not sure if it’s urine, regular fluid or blood. She pulls her daughter along, promising ice cream on the way home if she’ll be a good girl for a few more minutes. Chocolate ice cream, she asks. Strawberry? she asks—so that her daughter can almost taste the reward. So she’ll keep walking and not break down and cry in the middle of the furnace out here. Six months bed rest!

  Silvana doesn’t look as she did when Jovan knew her. Was it only six years ago? She has gained weight and doesn’t dress as daringly these days. Her hair was much longer then and there was that surprising beauty she used to own. Not quite ugly, yet close enough for those pressurised years of school to be an endless, slow-growing agony. Then flowering into something extraordinary in university, the bony, gangly girlhood smoothing out into graceful curves and gentle sways of loveliness. Or so the boys seemed to say with every glance her way. Their mouths were often far more crude. She preferred to keep in mind the lingering gaze of adoration when she passed. Hair down to her hips. All her movement keeping to the rhythm of a dance she had finally discovered. A radio station she never knew was there, playing in the background of her mind all the time. Making her feel plugged in. That she could move along with any kind of bustle, not getting knocked around anymore at all. Grades beginning to slide towards failure because of all the things she wanted to be doing. The ways she preferred to spend her time, waltzing along from one lovely moment to another. Student life in that university would have challenged the most ascetic temperament. She’d had enough years of boredom and silence in Mostar. Feeling the hectic, brutal old movements in the background. Not too far away. So near at times. Kept her moving very quickly. For the first time discovering that there was power in the world that didn’t belong exclusively to politicians and soldiers, that she could find and use some of it herself. That she enjoyed the new power she had, simply because she’d grown up into a woman that people thought was beautiful. Yet there would always be an awkward girl within, looking on with mouth agape.