by Marele Day
TWENTY
As well as constructing an aboveground city on this site there was also a city under the ground. Replicating the maze of roads that got us around on the surface was a maze of subterranean tunnels and pipes. In the sewer tunnels you could go from Balmain to Bondi without ever coming up above ground. As well as sewerage tunnels there were water tunnels, drainage, mining, electricity, gas, railway tunnels, telephone tunnels, not forgetting the Harbour Tunnel itself. We used them every day, in one way or another. We travelled on trains under the city, pulled water through the pipes every time we turned the tap on or flushed the toilet, sent messages along the cables in underground tunnels every time we used the phone.
Just when you think you’ve hit rock bottom you discover it’s only another layer and that there are more underneath. The surface of the city is merely a skin. Beneath it are the veins carrying life blood, air vents that act as lungs, the sewers a lymphatic system draining away waste products, telephone lines the nervous system transmitting messages for the proper functioning of the body.
In our myths, in our collective psyche, the underworld is a dark and unknown place, because there lurk the monsters with thin wraith-like tendrils that can pull you down. It is the dark side of the mirror. Dante’s downward rings that descend into hell.
One day Hades, God of the Underworld seized the beautiful young Persephone and took her down to his realm. Demeter, her mother, got understandably depressed and refused to perform her Earth goddess duties. She ranged around the world looking for her beloved daughter and for as long as she pined there was perpetual winter on earth. Eventually a deal was struck with Hades which meant that Persephone would spend six months of the year in the netherworld and half aboveground with her mother. But first Persephone had to be found.
Why was I thinking about myth and symbolism on a fine morning such as this? Well, you wouldn’t want me dwelling on the lowlife night I just had, would you? How could I do that? How could I have had sex with Steve’s best friend in the back of a borrowed panel van?
I felt a strong need to wash my sins away. I went into the bathroom, turned the shower on and stood under the hot needles of water. Then I wrapped a towel around my wet hair, dressed, and took a strong cup of black coffee out onto the balcony with me.
If Madalena had voluntarily disappeared the second time there was a good chance that she’d taken refuge in the womb of the earth. She’d been there before for the thrill of it. Now she was sheltering there. In the hard dank spaces underneath; the safe, enclosed spaces. She was somewhere under this city and the person most likely to know the exact location, if anyone knew at all, was Raf.
I went back to his spot on the street but he wasn’t there. He had been here recently, though, because The Last Supper had been erased and there were the beginnings of something new.
Maybe he’d gone to the loo and he’d be back in a minute. There were public lavatories in Hyde Park behind St James station. He could easily have ducked in there.
I waited. Sat on the wall and looked across the road to David Jones, the store where the kids and I had shopped for Mina and Brian’s wedding present. Its own advertisements said it was ‘the most beautiful store in the world’. My grandmother used to take me there on our trips to town. Everyone dressed up to go into the city then, even five year olds like me. We would go to the seventh floor and eat chicken sandwiches for lunch, thin triangles of white bread with the crusts cut off. Then we would come across to Hyde Park and I would try and catch pigeons, a fruitless task, while my grandmother would have a lie down on the grass. Hyde Park, the quiet oasis in the heart of the city.
If he was taking a pee, it was a long one. I walked past the newsstand guy and up the path leading to the men’s toilets, a likely place for nocturnal activities if ever I saw one. I hovered around for a while but no-one came in or out.
I walked further into the park, up a pathway bordered with brilliant blue agapanthus standing tall and straight in their skirts of dark green leaves. From my childhood the only birds I remember in the park were pigeons but now there were seagulls, and ibises strolling round poking their long curved beaks into everything.
I wandered over to the Archibald Memorial Fountain. Through the spray of water I kept watch on the patch of street Raf used as a canvas. He still hadn’t shown up.
On the central pedestal of the fountain stood a naked young Adonis permanently pointing towards St Marys Cathedral, though why a pagan god should be pointing in that direction was beyond me. Water fanned up behind him like a peacock’s tail and surrounding him were male and female figures wrestling, killing, or just plain posing with a variety of horned beasts. The tableau looked like a body-building contest for Olympians. Just what I wanted to be reminded of this morning—naked bodies and horned beasts.
I left the fountain to the tourists and walked over to a chess game in progress. There were huge black and white squares painted on the ground dotted with plastic chess pieces about a metre tall. Chaps sat around on benches talking or watching the game, just as they would have done in Mediterranean villages. Except here we were surrounded by tree ferns and other shade loving plants with large lush leaves. One of the players, a tall lanky man in shorts and a red T-shirt, had his shopping hanging in a plastic bag on a confiscated bishop. Throughout the entire game neither he nor his opponent said a word to each other.
On my way back down the path I watched a dero going through a bin. I caught myself in my old habit-looking but not doing anything about it. Raf obviously wasn’t here at the moment. I’d see if I could catch him later. In the meantime, if I wanted to watch homeless men, there was a place where I could look at them in droves.
TWENTY-ONE
Matthew Talbot Hostel for Men. The sign was on the corner facade of the brick building, a couple of minutes walk from William Street. Despite the drone of traffic up there the only sound in this quiet street was a radio blaring country music through the doors of a house open to provide some relief from the summer heat. Across the road from the hostel a dero, or rather a homeless man, sat propped up against a wall. Perhaps he was just enjoying the sunshine. Or maybe he was trying for the hostel and hadn’t quite made it. He had his arm in a sling and took no notice of me as I entered the hostel.
There were men, young and old, standing round the entrance. I went into a reception area with a curved reception desk of the type you find in old-fashioned hotels. Except the place was a lot more downmarket than a hotel. But not as downmarket as I expected it to be. It was clean, there was a strong smell of bleach, and it had recently been painted—green and pink.
There were three women behind the desk—a motherly woman in her fifties, a woman in her thirties who looked like she might have had a drink or two in her life, and a woman in her twenties who despite the freckles and the ponytail looked as if she could handle any funny business that might arise.
On the wall was a chart entitled Outreach, with photos of houses and flats and the suburbs they were located in. There were contact phone numbers at the bottom of the chart for those interested in medium/long term accommodation in community housing. Houses in Five Dock, flats in Newtown. It could have been a real estate agent’s.
I thought perhaps I’d be walking into Dante’s Inferno, that men would be pissing in the corners and dribbling in their beards. Screaming and clutching their stomachs, each in their own individual hell. But it wasn’t like that. The motherly woman asked if she could help me.
‘Yes,’ I said with false bravado, ‘I’m looking … I’m wondering if my …’ I had to stop. Inexplicably I was on the verge of tears. I don’t know why, but I felt the same as I did in the office of the crematorium when the clerk had said my father’s name. Probably a little fragile from the lack of sleep last night.
The motherly woman said softly, ‘Would you like to go somewhere more private?’ Like a nurse asking me if I’d moved my bowels, a ridiculous expression it seemed to me. I mean, what do you say? ‘Yes, I’ve moved them, I thought I’
d put them up round my lungs today’?
Having someone treat me condescendingly was enough to burst the little bubble of emotion that had welled up inside me. ‘I’m looking for Guy Valentine,’ I stated.
‘Is he staff or client?’ asked the woman.
‘Client.’
‘And what’s your interest?’
‘I’m his daughter,’ I announced.
If I thought that was going to open doors I was wrong. ‘You must understand,’ explained the woman, ‘that we respect our clients’ confidentiality here.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘he’s my father. If he’s here, if you know where he is, I want to see him.’
She spoke through an intercom then turned to me. ‘Nadia will be able to help you,’ she said.
I had the feeling she thought I was being difficult. I stepped back and turned my attention to the doorway leading to the inside of the hostel, waiting for Nadia to appear. There was a sign which said ‘To Left—games room, lounge, dining, kiosk, kitchen, laundry, clothing store. To Right—toilets, showers, proclaimed place, clinic, welfare, sick bay’. The sign was momentarily obscured by a bright-skinned woman with dark eyes, wearing clothes with Aboriginal motifs and big earrings. She came up to the desk and the motherly woman pointed in my direction.
‘Hi, I’m Nadia,’ she introduced herself to me. Having now passed me on, the motherly woman busied herself with other tasks. Nadia took me through to the right. We passed the clinic where a man was having his eyes tested against a chart with rows of letters, then we went up a ramp to a small glassed-in space marked Proclaimed Area. It looked over a dormitory of beds, three or four of which were occupied by men sleeping in their clothes. The beds were clean and white though none of the sleepers seemed to feel the need of sheets. Nadia sat down in the only available chair. There was a note stuck to the glass wall saying ‘If Charlie Holmes wakes up and asks for his money, tell him that Martin has banked it for him. On no account give him the money.’
It was kind of peaceful here, watching over these men as they slept during the middle of the day. Nadia explained that the Proclaimed Area was where the police bring the men when they’re drunk and disorderly, or if they look like they might do some damage to themselves. ‘Mrs Grimes tells me you’re looking for your father,’ Nadia said.
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Do you think he wants you to find him?’ asked Nadia.
The question was ridiculous. Of course he’d want me to find him. I’d rescue him from this place, take him home, give him a nice hot bath, a new set of clothes. ‘I’m his daughter,’ I said, as if that explained everything.
But apparently it didn’t. ‘Sometimes having a family member turn up is a disaster,’ said Nadia. ‘They get upset when they think about them, particularly at holiday times like this, when everything around them blares happy families. It makes them feel all that much worse.’ I realised now what was happening. She wasn’t helping me with my enquiries, she was counselling me. ‘It is a point of strength with the men not to get in touch with their families because they know their weaknesses. They know the hurt of the past—the guilt they already feel will be compounded if they’re reminded of it.’
I heard what she was telling me but it wouldn’t be like that with Guy and me. Once he saw me, the years would dissolve away and we would be happy families once again. ‘I appreciate that,’ I said. ‘I just want him to know that I’m here and that I’d like to see him. No strings attached. Perhaps I could just leave a message. If he doesn’t want to get in touch with me, OK. I’ll accept that.’ I knew even as I was saying it that I was lying.
‘Look, I understand how you feel,’ said Nadia. ‘My father was an alcoholic. Left home when I was thirteen. Not an easy age to have your father piss off, let me tell you. He swore he would never leave his children. You see, he’d been forcibly removed from his Mum and Dad. But,’ she sighed, ‘the pattern repeats itself.’
‘Did you ever see him again?’
‘Yes,’ said Nadia. ‘He got in touch with me. So it was a different ball game. I was twenty-seven. I’d already gone beyond thinking he was a bastard for leaving Mum to bring up four kids on her own. I was curious. So I went to see him. He was living in Mosman with another woman.’
‘Do you stay in touch?’
‘Sporadically.’
I asked her if she could at least tell me whether she knew the name Guy Valentine.
‘The guys in the Proclaimed Area, we write their names down in this book, but the others … they come and go as they please. Some of the regulars we know, those who’ve been coming here for years. They pay their eight bucks a night for accommodation, five for a meal. Often we know them only by a nickname. Some of them leave everything behind when they become homeless, including their names.
‘But if he’s been brought in here to the Proclaimed Area we’d probably have a record of him. Unless there was a volunteer on duty—sometimes, if it gets busy or there’s an emergency, they get a bit slack about the bookwork.’
She opened a ledger in which there were handwritten entries—the date, the name of the person, time in, time out, bed number. ‘Valentine, was it?’
‘Yes.’
She started looking through it, starting with today’s date. There was a stack of similar-looking ledgers on a shelf at the side. ‘Perhaps I could give you a hand,’ I offered.
‘Well,’ she hesitated, ‘we’re not supposed to.’ But she didn’t say anything when I opened the first ledger on the stack.
‘How far do the records go back?’ I asked.
‘Forever. When do you think your father might have been in?’
‘Anytime in the last thirty years.’
‘Oh,’ she said, with a downward inflection. We chatted a bit, her ‘charges’ slept on soundly, a heavy, immobile, alcoholic sleep filled with no dreams. It was tedious, boring work going through the ledgers but I was used to tedious, boring work. I pressed on, running my eye lightly down the list of names, looking for long surnames combined with short first names. I found one or two that were close, experienced the expectancy of the heart, the slight widening of the eyes, but they proved to be red herrings.
‘I’m ready to go now.’ The speech was slurred. One of the sleepers had got up and was now standing in front of Nadia.
She glanced down at the book. ‘Richard?’ He nodded laboriously. ‘Why don’t you go back to sleep for a little while,’ she said.
‘OK.’ Obedient as a child he climbed back onto his bed.
‘They’re supposed to stay here till they’re sober,’ she explained.
Together we went through the whole of the eighties, which was as far back as this particular set of ledgers went. Not once was there a mention of Guy Valentine. I even went through a couple of the ones Nadia had checked to make doubly sure.
‘You can always talk to the men,’ she suggested. ‘Although they may not talk back to you.’ She looked at her watch. ‘It’s just about lunchtime, you’ll get a couple of hundred of them in one go.’
This opportunity was too good to pass up. ‘Dining room’s straight down the corridor, is it?’ I said, remembering the sign near reception. I made moves to go.
‘Hang on,’ said Nadia. ‘I’m breaking for lunch now. As soon as Annette gets here I’ll come down with you.’
When Annette turned up Nadia escorted me to a huge room at the end of the corridor. Despite the cheery colours, it still looked institutional, like a hospital, or worse, a prison. On one side of the room were long rows of tables full of men eating salads. On the other side men sat in chairs in rows, just sitting quietly or watching the television on the wall. There were old men, young men, relatively well-dressed men, others in an odd assortment of clothes, like pink shorts with a suit jacket. Some were mentally disturbed.
They were men of all shapes and sizes, from all different backgrounds, but they had one thing in common—here in this room they were all well-behaved. The orderliness of them was eerie. Despite the lar
ge numbers, there was very little talking. A few of the younger ones who were waiting talked, mucked around a bit, but at the tables there was no animated dinner conversation. There didn’t appear to be any imposed order, no wardens or nurses walking around with big sticks.
‘It’s the different ways men and women are perceived in our society,’ explained Nadia. ‘Women’s refuges are houses, homes. Places of refuge for men are institutions. That way they don’t have to relate to each other. Or look after themselves—it’s all done for them.’ We walked down the aisle between the diners and those waiting. ‘G’day, nurse,’ someone yelled out. They weren’t all that orderly. ‘Specially the older blokes,’ Nadia continued, ‘they’re mainly loners. They have mates in here, but out on the street they’re solitary. The younger ones hang around together outside though, things are changing.’
There was a queue of men at the far end of the room lining up to get their salads. The kitchen was bustling with activity, the clinking of metal, of pots and pans. Probably for the inevitable cups of tea because nothing they were eating today needed cooking. There were crates of bread, vegetables and other food at the entrance to the kitchen area. ‘Donations,’ Nadia told me, ‘from bread companies, from local shops. How do you want to go about this?’
I said I’d try the older men first, the ones who would be about Guy’s age.
‘Rupert is pretty affable,’ said Nadia, pointing out a dapper little man in a frayed suit and tie despite the heat.
He was at a table with other men, none of whom were saying much. At the next table was the man with his arm in a sling that I’d seen outside. He hadn’t been sunning himself at all, just waiting outside till lunchtime. He was doing a good job of singlehandedly manoeuvring the salad onto a piece of bread to make a sandwich. I walked up past his table. No more comments now, everyone was intent on eating. Quietly, chewing their food well.
