A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists

by Jane Rawson

  ‘So,’ this was clearly too much silence for Farren, ‘you guys are married hey? Guess that makes you and Ray brothers-in-law? You do look kind of alike.’

  Caddy was going to point out that being brothers-in-law didn’t make two people actually related, but she could see that wasn’t going to lead anywhere she particularly wanted to go. Had she really had a bit of a crush on this guy? Well, yes, she had. That was just the kind of person she was, she supposed. Hurrah.

  ‘Yeah, we’re both a bit brown I guess,’ Harry apparently didn’t want to leave it alone just yet. ‘Ain’t that right, cuz?’

  Ray waved goodbye to a brilliant business opportunity. ‘Sure thing bro. I mean, you’re Maori, right – that’d be some kind of Polynesian if I’m not mistaken. And I’m Iora, which means my people used to live around Sydney area and probably never even heard of a Polynesian. But sure, why not? One brown bloke is much the same as the next, right?’

  ‘Aw, come on guys, I was just trying to be friendly. Let me buy you a VB, yeah?’

  Ray was about to say ‘sure’, but Harry got in first, ‘Thanks mate, I can buy my own beers,’ which meant Ray felt he had to take sides.

  Caddy knew Harry actually couldn’t get his own beers, so she slipped him a few dollars under the table.

  ‘In fact,’ he said, as he felt the warm coins in his palm, ‘how about I get us some beers. Ray?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Three VBs please ma’am,’ Harry called to Peira, who looked a bit peeved as she put the cocktail menu back under the bar.

  ‘And another vodka thanks,’ said Caddy. How had Peira resisted asking about Harry for so long? They’d been there at least half an hour. She was being unusually discreet.

  ‘So mate,’ Harry turned to Ray, ‘you ever find that house you were looking for? Your boss sort you out eventually?’

  ‘No, I gave up in the end, came back here. You? You find your fencer?’

  ‘Nah, never showed up. Dunno what happened to the bloke.’

  ‘So you came here instead?’

  ‘Yeah, tracked Caddy down at Docklands hanging out with her mate Simon – you know this bloke? American bloke, older …’

  Ray looked at Caddy but she wasn’t meeting his eye. ‘Don’t think so. Caddy, do I know this bloke?’

  ‘Yeah, don’t know.’

  ‘I guess not. So that was all cool, no problems getting here?’

  ‘Yeah, no worries. Why’d you ask?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno. Making conversation. So anyway, I’ve heard a lot about you. I don’t know if you know, but I think Caddy has a bit of a crush on you.’

  Caddy smiled. Farren kept trying to chat to her, but she wanted to eavesdrop on these two, so she cut him off.

  ‘Yeah, that’s weird how you guys know each other,’ Harry was saying. ‘I don’t think I ever heard her talk about you. You just been friends lately?’

  ‘I guess it’s been about two years.’

  ‘That’s a while, eh.’

  Farren dramatically drained his can and stood up. ‘Right, well, better get back to it. Caddy, lovely to see you again, and so nice to meet your husband.’ Caddy was pretty sure she was blushing. ‘Ray, why don’t you call me some time about the whole map thing. Thank you for the beer, sir.’

  Peira looked up, but he was talking to Harry. Farren stepped out into the sunshine, thrusting his hands in his pockets and glancing up at the sky before striding onto the street. As he turned the corner, swarms of children descended, drawn like flies by a clean shirt and genuine aviator sunglasses.

  ‘Sorry I was mean to your friend, Cad,’ Harry said.

  ‘It’s OK. He’s Ray’s friend really.’

  ‘Business associate.’

  ‘Sorry: he’s Ray’s business associate really.’

  ‘What business you in, Ray?’

  ‘Oh, this and that. Alternative travel methods at the minute. Just a little proposal I’ve got with Farren. Can’t talk too much about it right now.’

  ‘Sure, no worries. Hey Cad?’

  ‘Yes sweety.’

  ‘It’s real bright today, don’t ya reckon?’

  ‘I spose. It’s always pretty bright.’

  ‘Yeah, seems extra bright today though. You got any spare cash on you? Reckon you could grab me some sunnies off someone?’

  ‘Here, borrow mine. Take this five bucks and see what you can get hold of.’

  For what felt like half an hour after Harry left, Caddy felt Ray sitting, staring, sitting, staring.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said eventually, ‘I know.’

  ‘Caddy, he’s imaginary.’

  ‘What did I just say?’

  ‘You said you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  Ray was still staring at her. She could feel it. She looked out into the harshness of the street, hoping for a friendly face, someone to come over and say, ‘Hey Cad, you know what? It’s not Harry that’s imaginary, it’s all this bullshit. That’s right, this is ALL A DREAM.’ Maybe it would be her mum, perhaps. That would be nice.

  ‘What Ray?’

  ‘Do you really know it? I mean, you know it in your head. But Caddy! Jesus girl, what are you going to do?’

  ‘Fuck. Ray, I don’t know. I don’t know. Can we not just act like he’s real?’

  ‘Is it like he’s real though?’

  Caddy thought for a while. She wanted the answer to be yes. Sure. Yes. She couldn’t tell the difference. But she could tell the difference. It wasn’t just the tattoo. He wasn’t Harry. It was all the good bits she’d remembered, but now he was here she was aware that there were all kinds of good bits she hadn’t remembered to remember, and she could feel their absence. She missed the way he really gave her the shits sometimes, for starters.

  ‘No, alright. No.’

  ‘OK, so what are you going to do?’

  ‘How the fuck would I know? You’re the ideas man.’

  Ray just did that whole staring thing again.

  ‘What? Seriously, what? You have a lot of experience deciding what to do about your dead imaginary husband who you love like it makes you crazy but who is clearly dead and imaginary and therefore you can’t just, can’t just …?’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve done all kinds of not sane stuff before. Maybe I can just be with dead imaginary Harry. Maybe I can.’

  ‘Hey look, if you can make this work I’m totally down with it. With you every step of the way. We’ll just carry on, no tricky questions, no nothing. He’s Harry, your husband, been here all along, no worries.’

  Caddy gently lowered her forehead to the table, but thanks to the vodka slightly miscalculated and whacked herself a good one at the last second.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘You right there?’

  ‘Yeah. Argh.’ She rested her chin on the table and looked up at him from under her eyebrows. ‘What should I do?’

  ‘Right. Here’s my idea.’ Ray pulled up the leg of his blue nylon soccer shorts and rested his left foot on his right knee. ‘We all move to The Gap. Go live in San Francisco. The whole thing’s made up by you, Harry will fit in just fine.’

  ‘We’re not made up by me.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘Oh don’t try and trap me in some dumb arse philosophical argument! You know what I mean.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I don’t know if we’ll fit in. I think we’ll get bored. I know there are edges to that world. I made it up. It’s so, I don’t know, narrow and shallow.’

  ‘When was the last time you left Melbourne? It’s not a rhetorical question, don’t frown at me and look at the ceiling.’

  ‘OK, about never.’

  ‘We can’t go anywhere here even if we wanted to, there’s nowhere left to go. You think there aren’t edges to this world?’’

  ‘We could go to Tassie. Or New Zealand. Lanh’s brother went to Tassie.’

  ‘Oh yeah, there’s a big adventure. Let’s move to Tassie and stay in our lit
tle Federation era cottage with our immediate family protecting our last few worldly goods and ordering in sushi.’

  ‘Alright. ALRIGHT Don’t be smug. I accept your argument about the lack of adventure here. But Ray, it’s MY imaginary San Francisco. I already know about everything in my imagination. There isn’t even the risk that the sushi I order in will make me sick or be more expensive than I thought it was going to be, because I wouldn’t imagine something like that for myself, would I? You know?’

  ‘Yeah, OK. It’s not perfect. So let’s hear your idea. Oh! what a surprise! Caddy doesn’t have an idea!’

  ‘Hey look, while we’re at it, all giving each other shit and stuff, why did you bring Farren here?’

  Peira interrupted. ‘You ordering another drink or am I kicking you out?’

  ‘Caddy has to wait for her dead imaginary husband to come back.’

  ‘Ray Pickett,’ Peira threw a menu down in front of him, ‘don’t try and bring me in to your shenanigans. Drink?’

  ‘Thank you yes. I’ll have a strawberry daiquiri.’

  ‘No strawberries, you know that.’

  ‘Mango?’

  ‘Please try to be serious, if only for a minute.’

  ‘Banana daiquiri please.’

  ‘And for you?’

  ‘Peira, you know what I want.’

  ‘A vodka and tonic for the lady. Fine. And your dead husband, will he be back? A drink for sir?’

  ‘Nothing for now Peira, thank you.’ Sometimes Caddy felt like an eight year old in this place. Maybe that’s why she kept coming here.

  ‘Hey Peira,’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Say you had a husband …’

  ‘I have a husband.’

  ‘Whoa! Really?’

  ‘Caddy, don’t act surprised. You’ve never asked me a single question about my life, why on earth would you know my marital status?’

  ‘OK, sorry. Anyway. So you have a husband. Just say he died, and then you kept thinking about him all the time, remembering all the good things about him and conveniently forgetting the bad stuff, and then one day he came back. And he was all the stuff you’d remembered, but you realized you weren’t sure that stuff really was the good stuff, but now that was it, that was him.’

  ‘All the good stuff, and none of the bad?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I suppose you would rejoice and thank your lucky stars.’

  ‘Yeah, you’d think that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘If you weren’t some kind of angsty hipster that’s exactly what you’d think.’

  Caddy was realizing why she’d previously limited conversation with Peira to ‘vodka and tonic’ and ‘oh, come on, can you PLEASE put the fan on?’

  But she did admit that Peira kind of had a point.

  ‘Caddy,’ Harry slumped down in the seat next to her, yellow wrap-arounds perched on his head, ‘it is HOT out there.’

  ‘Another VB?’ Peira had apparently had enough of that conversation too.

  ‘Please!’

  Ray claimed he had stuff to do. ‘But hey Cad,’ he said as he was leaving, ‘track me down if you decide SF is the way to go.’

  ‘Sure, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘I mean, track me down whatever. You know I’m fine whatever.’

  ‘I know. Thanks Ray.’

  He winked, tipped an imaginary hat at her and headed off into the sunshine.

  ‘Bye Ray. Here’s your change honey,’ Harry handed her $1.

  ‘Nice bargain hunting, they look good.’

  ‘Yeah, ta.’

  ‘You alright?’

  ‘Yeah, nah. Bit hot. It’s making me feel a bit fuzzy.’

  ‘Yeah, it is a bit hot. That VB should sort you out. If it doesn’t, have a few more and at least you’ll have a reason to feel fuzzy.’

  But she was worried. He did look a bit, well, fuzzy.

  ‘Instead of that, do you reckon we could go home?’

  ‘Sure sweetie.’ Only they didn’t have a home to go to. ‘Any ideas where we could go?’ She saw the drawn, confused look on his face and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll figure something out.’

  Lanh’s was surely out of the question. They probably had about thirty dollars between them, so a hotel was impossible too. They could go down to Flagstaff or Fitzroy Gardens and bribe someone for a bit of space – but she had no stove anymore, no water container, no mattress … shit, instead of getting drunk with Simon and drinking vodka with her dead husband, she really should have been getting her life sorted out.

  ‘I’ll just go pay, OK, and we can head off?’

  Harry nodded.

  ‘Found a new place to live yet, Caddy?’

  ‘No, not yet.’ What was she, psychic?

  ‘Tell you what. You two clean up here tonight when we close, mop the floor and do the dishes, you can sleep on the floor behind the bar. I’ve got a piece of foam we can put down there.’

  Caddy thought she must be joking, but she didn’t look like she was joking.

  ‘Serious? Peira, that would be totally awesome. Unbelievably awesome. But I haven’t got money or anything I can give you …’

  ‘I already told you, you clean up, it’s fine. You can use the hotplate and the toilet and sink. I’m taking classes in the evening. I don’t want to be late. Closing up takes time.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you so much. Sorry I never asked about your husband.’

  ‘Seriously, I’m really not that interested in discussing my husband with you. Your husband looks nice. I’m glad he’s not dead.’

  ‘Yeah, me too.’ I think.

  ‘OK, closing is at seven.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Yes, of course. So be back here then and I’ll show you what to do. Things go OK, you can stay a while. We’ll see. Leave the cat though. She’s kind of cute.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you. We won’t get in the way.’

  ‘Shut up now.’

  Oh man, she really should be nicer to Peira.

  ‘Hey Harry, guess what?’

  ‘Don’t make me guess.’

  ‘Peira says we can stay here tonight. Maybe longer, see how we go.’

  ‘Hey, that’s great.’

  ‘You don’t sound that stoked.’

  ‘No, I am, I am. I’m just weird feeling. Tired or something.’

  ‘Yeah. It’s been a full-on day. Anyway, we’ve got to be back here at seven, but we should probably clear out till then. Anything you want to do?’

  ‘Lie down. Man, I wish we had the hammock.’

  ‘Yeah, that hammock was grouse. Hammock and a beer would be great. Hang on,’ Caddy went through her pockets and her backpack and did some sums in her head. ‘We’ve got thirty-two dollars and 40 cents. I reckon we can splash out on a hammock, yeah? Now we’ve got a place to sleep. We’ll need a bit for some food to cook tonight, or we can grab a bit of pigeon or something. And tomorrow I’ll see if Ray or this other bloke Lanh has some work we can do.’ She was going to have to find a new line of work. ‘So what do you say? Want to go grab a platform?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, that’d be great.’

  ‘You reckon you can walk? It’s only about ten minutes.’

  ‘Yep, no worries.’

  This would be good. Like old times. She and Harry used to come down to the river once or twice a month and rent a platform over the water for an hour or two. They’d get one with a couple of hammocks and some straw mats to stretch out on, an MP3 player loaded up with bad music from the 2010s, a six-pack in an esky and then they’d just lie around, drink a couple of beers, watch the boats go by and joke with children who wandered in from the other platforms. She used to love that.

  This’d be good. Harry was back; she was glad he was back. She hadn’t been to the platforms once since he’d gone. He was back. She loved him; she couldn’t be happier.

  ‘Cad, does my shadow look weird to you?’

  ‘What’re you talking about? Don’t be silly.’

  ‘
Serious. Does it look weird to you?’

  She pulled him over to her and kissed him on the mouth. ‘I missed you.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He picked her up a bit, but put her down again just as quickly. ‘So you think it’s OK?’

  She looked. ‘It’s a shadow. What’s weird?’

  ‘Stand here. Stand next to me. See?’

  OK, it was a bit weird. His shadow was quite a lot darker than hers. She looked around at the people pressing past. Probably they all had different shadows, right? But they didn’t. Alright, a couple did, but mostly they were all the same.

  ‘Yeah, I guess it’s a bit darker. That’s not that weird though, hey? I mean, nothing to worry about. We’ll get out of the sun and it’ll be fine.’

  Only it was weird. Because the thing was, no matter how much she wanted it not to be true, Caddy could see Harry’s shadow getting darker and darker. And no matter how hard she tried not to let them, drips of that dream she’d had the night she slept by Stony Creek kept oozing into her head. And somewhere behind them, she could see the slick of stickiness that Tarkin Collins had left in the gutter.

  ‘Let’s get a hammock and lie down,’ she said. ‘It’ll be fine.’

  Later that night, on a thin foam mattress on the tiled floor of one of Melbourne’s least prestigious bars, Caddy held her husband’s hand tight and tried not to wake him.

  ‘Don’t go, OK Harry? Don’t go.’

  The mattress was a little bit sticky. They’d tried to be quiet and they’d tried to clean up with some paper towels from behind the bar, but Caddy just knew Peira would somehow be able to tell. She’d never had a boyfriend over to her parents’ house before they died but she thought it must feel a bit like this.

  There’d been a lot of this the past year or so, with a lot of different people. And she knew this wasn’t really Harry, not really. Harry was gone. But she’d still burst into tears in the middle of it, just at the relief of it all, of Harry, of normal life – here, on a mattress on the floor of a bar – at the comfortable smell of him, his predictable Harryness, the tender way he pushed her hair behind her ear and looked at her face a little bit too long, until she had to smile.