Disappearing off the Face of the Earth

by David Cohen

  ‘Not stealing: walking. Walking in the corridor. I know that for a fact.’

  ‘Walking in the corridor after-hours, several times, just when things happened to be going missing. As Ron said: bit of a coincidence.’

  ‘And as I say: much bigger coincidences happen every day.’

  ‘I’d rather confess here than at the police station. I’d really prefer not to go to jail; I’m funny that way.’

  I climbed into my car and sat there for a short while with my hands on the wheel. I knew that Bruce was still standing there, watching me.

  I opened the window.

  ‘And while we’re on the subject,’ I said, ‘you’re welcome.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For not mentioning your name.’

  ‘No, I do appreciate that, Ken,’ he said, ‘very much so. But … well, you may have been the one on camera, but Ron knows we’re a team. He’s dumb but he’s not that dumb. I think my days here are numbered.’

  I nodded but said nothing. Bruce remained silent too for a while.

  ‘Why did you have to look at that camera?’ he said at last. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know why. It was a momentary lapse.’

  ‘Well, that lapse ruined a good thing.’ He sighed. ‘Ah well, such is life.’

  That Ned Kelly–esque remark was quite fitting, because those were the last words I heard Bruce say for a long time. That very day, he simply vanished from my life. I had no idea when or if I’d ever see him again. Either way, now seemed like a good time to visit Uncle Dennis.

  Twenty-two

  When the police show up at your self-storage facility, you can be sure it’s never a good thing. And this time was no exception.

  Ellen had gone missing.

  ‘She hasn’t showed up at her shop in a couple of weeks,’ one of the officers explained. He looked uncannily like Kevin Spacey. ‘And it doesn’t look like she’s been home either.’

  Nor had she ever come to collect her things. I kept thinking back to our last phone conversation. That conversation was not pleasant, not pleasant at all. I wondered if she’d talked to anyone else about our relationship, especially the part about being locked in her storage unit. Even if Bruce was to blame, it wouldn’t reflect well on me right now.

  ‘I understand she rents a unit here?’ said Spacey.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She was supposed to move her things out a couple of weeks ago. I wondered why she never showed up.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Would you like to take a look at the unit?’ I said.

  Technically I wasn’t allowed to break into Ellen’s unit, as not enough time had elapsed. But if the police authorised it, that was good enough for me. I opened the cupboard, grabbed the boltcutters and led the police officers up to Level 1.

  The interior of the unit looked much the same as when I’d last been there: scooters of various makes and models, neatly arranged. Maybe some had since been brought in, others removed. I noticed nothing untoward.

  ‘I suppose I should mention that we were … involved on a personal basis,’ I said as I watched the cops look around. ‘But it ended some time ago.’ I wanted to be cooperative and completely open. ‘I hope she’s okay.’

  ‘When did you last speak with her?’ Spacey asked.

  ‘When she called to tell me she was coming in to take her things. That was around three weeks ago.’

  They asked a few more questions and seemed satisfied that I’d told them everything I could.

  ‘In the meantime,’ Spacey said, ‘you’d better lock this unit up again.’

  He left a card and asked me to contact him if I thought of anything else. They showed themselves out and I remained in the unit, just inside the doorway. I recalled when Ellen and I first met, right here. I could see her in her red tracksuit, among the mobility scooters. I thought, If only I could see her again, but deep down I knew I never would.

  I could feel the coldness of the concrete floor seeping through the soles of my shoes and up into my body, turning me to stone a little bit at a time.

  Then Bruce appeared.

  I removed my glasses and wiped my eyes. ‘What do you want?’ I said.

  ‘I was replacing a light nearby,’ Bruce said. ‘I heard you and the police talking.’

  ‘Ellen’s officially a missing person.’

  Bruce surveyed the unit but said nothing.

  ‘She’s gone, Bruce.’

  I couldn’t contain myself any longer.

  ‘I don’t know what I’ll do without her!’

  ‘Maybe she hasn’t gone forever,’ Bruce replied. ‘But if she has, I honestly believe she’s gone to a better place.’

  ‘I’m in no mood for your fucking platitudes!’

  ‘She was a lonely woman, Ken, a desperately lonely woman.’

  I turned to face Bruce. ‘Shut up! You know nothing about her!’

  ‘I talked to her, Ken.’

  ‘When? When did you talk to her?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter when. What matters, Ken, is that you know what I’m saying is true. She had a hard life. She was a troubled soul, Ken.’

  I felt too upset to say anything more. Now Bruce was standing next to one of the scooters, a burgundy-coloured one, sweeping some dust off the seat. He was almost caressing it.

  ‘Stop doing that!’

  ‘Okay, Ken.’ He withdrew his hand. ‘But let’s just suppose, hypothetically, that she really has gone, forever. Is there any point in keeping all this here, gathering dust?’ He moved back towards the doorway, towards me. ‘Do you know what I’m saying, Ken?’

  I looked down and noticed that I was still holding the bolt-cutters. For a moment I pictured myself, quite clearly, swinging them through the air and bringing the chrome vanadium steel jaws down on Bruce’s bald head.

  ‘You were always jealous of my relationship with Ellen,’ I said. ‘You resented it. You resented me being happy for once. You think I didn’t notice? Course I fucking did. And now she’s gone, you’re over the moon, aren’t you? She hasn’t even been gone three weeks and you’re talking about selling off her things, you fuck!’

  ‘I had nothing against her – I just don’t think she was good for you, Ken. You were neglecting the business, and the business should always come first. We need money, Ken.’

  I laughed. ‘If you think I’m taking any of this stuff to Kelvin Gadd —’

  ‘Well, obviously not Kelvin, but somewhere.’

  ‘What do you mean “obviously not Kelvin”?’

  ‘You told me yourself, Ken, about his accident.’

  ‘What accident?’

  ‘Are you telling me you don’t remember, Ken? Kelvin fell through the stairs. You said he was walking down the back stairs of his house and the stairs broke. They were old and rotting and could no longer carry his weight. Remember, Ken? You’d warned him about those stairs but he didn’t listen – too busy with eBay and Yahtzee. He smashed his head on the stones below and that was it. Game over.’

  Bruce was standing close to me now, so close that his breath seemed to be coming out of my mouth.

  ‘Your mind’s going, Bruce. I never said anything of the sort.’

  ‘Sorry, Ken, but I think it’s your mind that’s going. After all, you do keep forgetting things. The van, for instance – you didn’t remember giving me permission to use the van. You thought your jacket was my jacket, remember? And let’s not forget the padlocks.’

  ‘The padlocks?’

  ‘Yes, Ken, the Sargent and Greenleaf padlocks. You told me to put them on the units of people who’ve disappeared off the face of the earth. It started with Leonard Stelzer.’

  My head ached, so much so that I could feel my brain shuddering against the walls of my skull. ‘You never mentioned that when I asked you about the padlocks. You never said I told you to put them there.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t want to contradict you, Ken. I couldn’t understand why you asked that question but I just went along with it.’
<
br />   I looked at the padlock I was holding, the one I’d cut so that the police could enter. It was a Master – one of the most common padlocks around.

  ‘Why isn’t there one on this unit, then?’

  ‘Because, Ken, Ellen’s only been gone two or three weeks. She may be an official missing person, but by our requirements she hasn’t yet disappeared off the face of the earth.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Ken, I know you’re upset about Ellen, but we need to focus on the business. This place is falling apart, literally.’

  ‘Selling defaulters’ stuff is like pissing on a bushfire,’ I shouted. ‘We need more tenants – that’s what we need.’

  Bruce laughed. ‘More tenants, Ken? Don’t you mean some tenants? In case you haven’t noticed, we don’t have any. The ones who haven’t disappeared off the face of the earth have simply moved out. All the units are empty now. Ellen was the last to go.’

  Twenty-three

  I hadn’t gone straight to Queensland after the Pharaoh’s Tomb fiasco. First, there was another period of seclusion and Jethro Tull in my flat. All the while, though, I couldn’t rid myself of the uneasy feeling that if I remained in Melbourne, something bad would happen. So off I went, at last, to visit Dennis.

  He and his second wife, Rhonda, who’d now been with him longer than his first wife, lived in a large white townhouse in Broadbeach.

  ‘Stay as long as you like,’ Rhonda said. ‘We don’t use the upstairs much anymore, so you can have it to yourself.’

  They also had a nice kitchen with a massive fridge stocked with food, although neither of them seemed to eat much of it. Rhonda invited me to help myself. Well, a bit of luxury for a change wouldn’t hurt, and I was happy not to have to blow the small chunk of money I’d saved doing legitimate work and augmenting my income at Pharaoh’s Tomb.

  As for Dennis, these days he was less concerned about dispensing investment advice as he was with putting his pants on the right way around. He’d noticed that, more and more often, the world was taking the piss, first by placing words just out of reach, or switching them around, or concealing them completely, and now doing likewise with things, putting his wallet where the milk was meant to be and the milk where his wallet was meant to be, hiding his shoes and messing about with his keys so they wouldn’t open the front door.

  He wasn’t yet ready for the nursing home, but Rhonda didn’t like leaving him alone in the townhouse for long periods. Although she wasn’t much younger than Dennis, she was still sharp and active, still playing golf and doing charity work. I was happy to spend time with him, keeping him company while he watched TV – he still never missed a Broncos match – driving him to the doctor and the chemist, going on little trips to the local IGA for groceries.

  Once I tried to get him involved in a game of Monopoly, but he couldn’t remember the rules. I tried Scrabble, too, but he kept misspelling words, or coming up with words that didn’t mean anything, like P-R-A-K-E; he obviously had some actual word in mind, but that word didn’t make it from his brain to his hand to the board. And yet he considered each letter so carefully before setting it down, you could swear he knew exactly what he was doing.

  By this point, not only was Dennis’s mind crumbling away, his bones had now decided to get in on the act. These days he had to give a lot more thought to the question of how your legs carry you about the place, how you have to keep putting one foot in front of the other if you don’t want to stop altogether. Dennis could no longer drive his car very much, so walking was quickly becoming the only means of transportation he still had some control over. Old age, that malicious fucker, was seizing his assets, one by one.

  We’d go for very slow walks through the park or along the beachfront. We’d sit on a bench and soak up the sun. I tried to encourage him to reminisce about his life, his work, anything to get him talking. He used to talk a lot back in the day, unlike my father, who was a pretty silent and moody bastard in his pre-tumour period, and when the brain trouble set in he swung between silent moodiness and angry outbursts, usually precipitated by things like me cheating at Test Match or stealing imaginary cash from his wallet. Now the once loquacious Dennis could go ten minutes without uttering a word. And when he was talking, or walking, he might suddenly pause to gaze at something in the distance.

  ‘What’s that you’re looking at there, Dennis?’

  He was too absorbed to reply. He wasn’t really gazing out, though; he was gazing in.

  Other times while we were walking or talking, Dennis would get anxious and start saying, ‘Number twenty-nine. I’ve got to get to number twenty-nine.’ I didn’t know exactly where number twenty-nine was, or if number twenty-nine still existed, but Dennis referred to it at least once a day, so I assumed it must be important, or was once important.

  ‘Is that one of your properties?’ I asked. Maybe he’d hung on to this one for sentimental reasons.

  I was half right. Eventually I called Mum and asked her if she knew anything about number twenty-nine. She said it was the number of the house in Glen Waverley she and Dennis had lived in when they were growing up.

  I spent the next five months at Dennis and Rhonda’s place, hanging out with Dennis, talking to him, listening to him, helping him do things, although he always preferred to do them without help if he could. Dennis was a kind of surrogate father to me, and I was a kind of surrogate son to him, even though Dennis had a real son, and a real daughter, too – but Rhonda said they both still lived in Melbourne and weren’t that close to him. I suppose they might have paid a visit all the same, sooner or later, had what happened not happened.

  Dennis and I were watching 60 Minute Makeover one afternoon. It was just the two of us; Rhonda was out doing her charity work. At some point, Dennis left the room to go to the toilet. At least, that’s where I thought he’d gone. The next thing I knew, fifteen minutes had passed and he hadn’t returned. I wondered if he’d locked himself in – he’d certainly done that before – or perhaps fallen asleep.

  ‘Dennis?’ I got up and walked to the bathroom. He wasn’t there. I went into the bedroom and checked the ensuite; he wasn’t there either. I poked my head into every room and then I checked the upper floor, even though Dennis was unlikely to have climbed the stairs. I came back down thinking, Holy fuck, what if he’s fallen in the pool? But he hadn’t, nor was he anywhere else in the backyard. I checked the shed and the garage, various cupboards – any other space I could think of, no matter how small.

  What the fuck? I thought. He can’t have just disappeared off the face of the earth.

  He hadn’t, as it turned out, although that would have been preferable to what did happen.

  The next time I saw him, it was in the hospital. It seemed he’d walked out the door of the townhouse, up the driveway and into the street. From there he’d continued to put one foot in front of the other until he was about 2 kilometres up the road. So far, so good. But when he tried to cross the road without first taking a good look around, he was knocked over – not by a car, not even by a motorbike, but a cyclist, and not even the lycra-clad-wanker type. No, it was just a regular cyclist pedalling along at moderate speed, but Dennis stepped out right in front of him. Both Dennis and the cyclist went down. Dennis’s head struck the road. A younger man might have been better equipped to survive the trauma of being knocked to the ground by a bicycle travelling not particularly fast, but Dennis wasn’t a younger man.

  He died two days later. Had it not been for the accident, he might have hung on for another ten years, maybe more. But then what’s the point of hanging on if you can’t read a book or drive a car or have a decent conversation because where the words should be there are only gaps? Sooner or later they would have stuck him in a small room, and thence to the grave. You start life in a confined space and you end it there too.

  At least, that’s what I told myself. I also told myself that he’d never wandered off like that before, so how could I be expected to know? I thought he’d return
from the toilet in due course and we’d carry on watching 60 Minute Makeover, like we always did, because Dennis hated to miss the bit where the owners return, weeping with gratitude as Claire Sweeney ushers them from room to room. I had no idea he’d just bugger off like that. So how could I be expected to go out looking for him? Nobody ever claimed it was my fault. So maybe it wasn’t my fault. Was it my fault?

  The other, slightly less important question is: where was Dennis going? Was he going somewhere in particular, or just walking, going for a long stroll while his legs still allowed him the luxury of putting one foot in front of the other? I still lean towards the former theory. I think he was trying to make his way back to number twenty-nine.

  Twenty-four

  I phoned Kelvin. It rang and rang, but he’d never been one to answer his phone. So I drove all the way over there, noting along the way that the building site was crawling with machines and construction workers.

  Everything looked normal as I pulled in to Kelvin’s driveway. His was a quiet house at the end of a quiet street. A dog barked in a neighbour’s yard, a gecko darted up a retaining wall, a spider spun its web between two verandah posts. I parked under the house as usual, and stood for a moment in the dingy garage, listening. Normally I could hear Kelvin’s thongs shuffling on the other side of the floorboards as he worked. But everything was silent. I approached the back stairs, a small bubble of dread forming in my gut.

  Four of the wooden slats were broken, rotted through, forming a Kelvin-sized gap in the staircase. Maybe Bruce had been telling the truth, then. I looked at the rough, uneven paving below. There was no sign of Kelvin, which at this point wasn’t surprising. But there was no trace of blood either, and that was surprising – kind of.

  A magpie lark flew up and perched on the balcony railing, watching me closely as I contemplated the broken stairs. I had to check the house, but it wouldn’t be easy to get to the back door. Holding on to the banisters, I swung my legs up over the gap and onto the deck, using the banisters for support while I eased my upper body forward until it was more or less in the right place.