by A. S. Patric
Devon tried to push his thoughts away to something else. He thought about the birds his mother had bought him for his tenth birthday. The déjà vu followed him there but he couldn’t help it. Now he was thinking about how his mother had decided to buy the cage full of brightly coloured Dutch Frill Canaries because he’d begged for so long, even against Roland’s wishes. A big, wonderful cage that was meant to go in his room but when he got them home he found that they were noisy and he couldn’t sleep with them that near his bed. So they went downstairs. They were too noisy for Roland as well and they were moved to the back porch. Roland told Devon they were Devon’s birds, so it was Devon’s duty to feed them. But he forgot and Rose began feeding them.
His mother’s medication affected her memory though, and all the birds starved to death a few weeks later. No-one removed them from the ornate bamboo cage because Roland said they were still Devon’s responsibility and they just made Rose cry when she saw them. Then one day, Devon came home and climbed the stairs to his bedroom and found that Roland had taken the long jar that the Becketts normally used for spaghetti and filled it with the ten brightly coloured canaries. It was sitting on Devon’s school desk like it was a present for him. No-one threw it away and Devon watched them begin to decay. Maybe he was supposed to throw them out but he just couldn’t touch the glass and they started to seem pretty in that long, air-tight glass jar. Eventually they disappeared, as Roland finally dealt with the birds he’d insisted were a bad idea from the start.
The lift got to the top of the elevator shaft and released Devon. He turned Tindersticks off because they weren’t helping him with his déjà vu or the memory. He put on Mogwai’s album Come on Die Young. Skipped it to the song, ‘may nothing but happiness come through your door’.
The office had a breathtaking view of Melbourne but Mr Cornell wouldn’t have been able to tell Devon if it was raining without turning around to check.
On one of the walls was a portrait of Hyman Minsky, an economist Mr Cornell particularly liked to quote. Roland had told Devon that the repetitions over the last six months, of the same mantra, were maddening. ‘Extended periods of healthy growth convince people to take ever larger risks, and eventually, when enough people have enough risky bets on the table, the smallest trouble can have catastrophic results.’ In short, it was all about cycles but at the moment Mr Cornell wasn’t thinking about his mantra or Minsky. He was talking on the phone, giving someone harried directions regarding a meeting. As soon as he hung up he was speaking to Devon.
‘Get those white things out of your ears.’
‘Oh, sorry.’ Devon turned his iPod off and took out the earphones.
Mr Cornell was in his late fifties but he looked older. It took energy to talk as aggressively as he wanted. He took a deep breath. ‘Where’s Roland?’
‘He’s not here?’
‘Don’t be an idiot, son.’
‘I thought he was here. He’s not here?’
‘Don’t be a fucking idiot, Devon! What’s happening?’
‘I left for work. I always leave, like, twenty minutes before him.’
‘What? What do you mean “before him”?’
‘What?’
‘Basic question, son. Basic! The answer is …’
‘Well … I’ve got to get to the train on time. And he drives. So he leaves later.’
‘But you work in the same building. How do you not come in together?’
‘He says it teaches me discipline. To use timetables and trains. If he drives me, then it’s a luxury I haven’t earned. He …’
‘Son, I’m asking you where your father is.’
‘Mister Cornell, I’m trying to explain. I thought he was here.’
Mr Cornell stood up. He opened his arms and looked under his armpit. ‘Well, he’s not here, Devon. You understand? And it’s not a day he can miss. I mean, it’s impossible that he wouldn’t be here today, yet I’m looking around, and it seems like the impossible is my reality. Those clients in the meeting room just waiting for Santa Claus six months before Christmas. I mean … this is impossible. This is, in fact, inconceivable. And no phone call. Not even a phone call. I can’t go down there. What am I going to say to them? This was your father’s whole deal. The tough explanations. The visionary spiel. What am I supposed to do?’ His voice had become a roar but the statements had become childlike and the question didn’t seem rhetorical.
Mr Cornell closed his eyes. He leaned heavily on the desk with his arms before him instead of slumping back into his office chair like he wanted to. He murmured sotto voce as though he had forgotten his partner’s son was in the room. ‘And he knows I’ve got cancer.’ He swallowed but held himself up at his desk. ‘That I’m going. That there’s nothing I can do to stop it.’ He opened his eyes and looked at Devon.
Mr Cornell said, ‘I’m sorry. I know it must be hard for you to even think about cancer.’ Cancer meant almost as little to Devon as Sagittarius. He didn’t say anything though.
Mr Cornell asked, ‘Was it long? Her suffering? Sorry to ask …’
‘What do you mean? Whose suffering?’
‘Your mother, Rose. Dying of cancer. Leukaemia …’
‘My mother didn’t die of cancer.’ Devon shook his head. Couldn’t imagine that Roland had maintained a lie like that for almost ten years.
Devon said, ‘A bathtub full of blood. That’s what it looked like. Blood on the bathroom floor. Blood down the hall. Down the stairs. Blood on all the handles. Because he carried her out to the street crying, like a woman.’ Devon fumbled with his iPod. Managed to get the earphones into his head. Sometimes he thought of them as plugs. And sometimes he wished he never had to pull them out at all. ‘I don’t know what leukaemia is,’ he told Mr Cornell.
Devon didn’t want to go home. He sat on a bench outside the tower and thought about places he could go. He listened to the whole album Ma Fleur by The Cinematic Orchestra. Eventually some young guns from the firm spotted him and recognised him as Roland Beckett’s son. Pulled him along with them, down the road to a bar, for a drink. Devon said yes but he followed them with his earphones in. He walked into the bar listening to ‘Suds & Soda’ by dEUS.
Of course they yanked out his earphones but they let him put them back in after a few minutes and motioned sign language at him occasionally. Making fun of him but unable to make him respond. They left him to drift into his numb paralysis.
He watched them mock and torment a young waitress by dropping things for her to pick up, like cigarettes and beer bottles. When they got even more drunk they let a glass break and made her clean it up. She was too pretty and removed. She wasn’t impressed by them. Maybe that’s what it was, but Devon didn’t feel sorry for her. He didn’t hate the hot shots. He listened to another song by dEUS called ‘Jigsaw You’.
If he was honest with himself, he wasn’t numb at all really. He wasn’t quiet and still because he had nothing to say or nothing he felt like doing. He kept imagining what they would do, these young men in their lovely attire, if they saw him start screaming and flailing his arms around. He skipped to the next song. Mouthed, not yet. Not yet. Just a few more moments. And knew it would pass. That it could pass like a song. That it had passed. If he gave it another few seconds.
The young men from his father’s firm began to leave and he left with them but they each went to cars or piled into taxis and he still couldn’t go home. He walked a few steps as though he would go somewhere but then turned down the first alley and found a place beside a dumpster full of wine bottles, beer bottles and bottles for spirits. Other dumpsters had different kinds of rubbish. He listened to an album by a band called Lamb.
The waitress came out of a side door in tears. She lit a cigarette even though her face was getting warped by the crying. She took a puff and didn’t move. She tried to get the hurt out but new waves kept breaking over her. She took a few more breaths and then noticed Devon beside the dumpster.
It would have been natural for her to fl
ick her cigarette at him or shout something and leave, but she walked over to him and motioned with just her palm opening and closing to stand up. He got to his feet and took a step towards her, wondering whether she wanted to kick him for what the men he was with had done to her.
She stepped closer to him and took one of his earphones and put it in her ear. ‘Górecki’ was playing. She listened for a few moments.’
‘I got fired,’ she said.
After a moment, he said, ‘That sucks.’
‘Didn’t want the job, really.’
‘Maybe you should be happy.’
‘I should have quit though.’
‘Maybe you did. Just reversed the way it happened.’
‘I like this song,’ she said, and Devon nodded at her. ‘I was wondering what you were listening to all night.’
‘Just music,’ he said.
‘It didn’t make sense—you with those arseholes.’
‘I’m an arsehole as well. I’m worse.’
She smiled like she didn’t believe him and leaned in to kiss. She was still wearing her name badge. It said ‘Nadia’. It took a while for Devon to feel Nadia’s lips. He had a lot of thoughts about what it might be like. It felt like nothing until he closed his eyes. There was tobacco on her breath and there was the taste of tears because her face was still wet. Nadia was the first person Devon had kissed. They listened to Lamb play a song called ‘Gabriel’.
When the déjà vu started this time it brought with it the phrase ‘studiously aloof’ and the words ‘Perils of Paradise’ he’d seen on the toilet door. Déjà vu about kissing Nadia and the feeling of suffocation, like both of them were stuffed in a long, air-tight glass tube. Déjà vu about being in this alleyway surrounded by the bottles. Déjà vu in the taste of tears and tobacco. Devon thought about ‘pain in paradise being a pleasure in hell’, and didn’t know where Nadia’s kiss came from.
He walked to Flinders Street station. Let two trains go before he caught one. He listened to Primal Scream. He got to Brighton station on the last train. Got off and walked home slowly. Turned up the volume on his iPod until he could barely think. Unlocked the front door. The air in the house seemed vast and dead. Like it had been a tomb for a decade instead of a day. Everything perfectly placed and immaculately clean. As always. As though Roland and Devon Beckett had been living in a museum instead of a home.
He walked to the phone and plugged it into the wall. He turned his iPod off and pulled out the white plugs. He dialled the number for the police. He hung up. Took a breath and tried again. He told them he’d found the body of his father on the kitchen floor. That Roland Beckett was dead. He said it a few times before they accepted the information and asked him for his name and address and then told him they were sending a car over. They would have continued talking to him but Devon hung up and pulled the phone out of the wall again. He picked up his iPod. Put it down again. The light was still on in the kitchen from the morning.
Devon walked towards the kitchen and its body. When he got there he sucked in a hiss of air. The two perfect white buttons from his father’s shirt were still on the pristine oflf-white tiles. One with thread in it and the other without thread. But the body wasn’t where it had fallen. The body wasn’t there.
Devon couldn’t think. He looked around like it might materialise suddenly. He listened to the house and couldn’t hear a thing. He wasn’t sure if it was silent. His ears were roaring with sound. He wasn’t sure his eyes were working properly either. He kept blinking, trying to see the body of his father. But it wasn’t there and now he thought he could hear the sound of footsteps climbing down the stairs.
THE MIRAGE INN
There were messages on the answering machine. Daniel had not picked up their baby from day care. It was Wednesday night and Audrey had come home expecting her husband to be feeding Keenan dinner. No-one had called the teachers to tell them there was a problem and Mrs Hastings hadn’t been able to reach anyone on the two emergency numbers. Keenan was playing happily with Mrs Hastings when Audrey got to care, as if nothing in the world could be wrong.
Daniel was gone and Audrey assumed the worst. Hospitals and police were of little help. Days passed with no sign of him. All she could do was continue to dial numbers. Audrey would have preferred reports of accident or injury, even heart attack or crash, over the news she eventually received. That the man she’d been sharing her life with for over a decade was lying on a bed, in a motel called The Mirage Inn, watching porn.
Her husband had left his mobile on the windowsill in a room he’d paid for with cash. The next guest had picked up the phone three days later and turned it on. Discovered 161 missed calls. Waited only a few minutes before Daniel’s mobile rang. It had been sitting by a window overlooking a dismal little pool covered by leaves, foil wrappers and plastic bottles bobbing on the water.
Audrey dumped Keenan with Daniel’s mother. Didn’t say where she was going. Didn’t answer any questions at all. She even swore at the bewildered old woman. Got back into her car and was away before Dan’s mother could take it in. Grandma’s was the only place Audrey could leave her son for a few days. Keenan had been wailing for hours. He’d stopped crying as soon as he was released from his mother’s frantic embraces.
She went out to The Mirage Inn, so far north of Adelaide there was only desert beyond the compound. Audrey was taken to the room where Daniel had stayed. The owner was trying to be helpful as he walked her around the room but could only tell her about the takeaway food, Scotch and porn. She paid him for the room, asked him to leave, and continued to look around. In a drawer of the bedside table was a picture of Steve May—taken years ago at Audrey’s office Christmas party, when she was working on Gouger Street. A photograph she’d forgotten about once she had hidden it away.
On the back of the photo, in biro welts that had pushed through the image and could be read in reverse across Steve’s body, were a few sentences. Daniel had written about the days passing and seeing Steve’s face surfacing like a man taking years to come up for air. A stranger, pushing his way through the vivid blue eyes of Keenan.
Audrey put the photo back in the bedside drawer. She went outside to the small pool, lay on a deckchair made of varicoloured strips of plastic and closed her eyes. She felt nothing. Wanted to hang onto that numbness. Waited for the tears. They came in the tiny motel room, a little after two in the morning. She fell asleep and woke up before daybreak, crying again. Not the kind of tears she wanted. They came from the surface, from self-pity. She was drowning below—barely able to make a noise.
She couldn’t move for the next few days. Didn’t know where to go or what to do now. Sleep came in brief instalments and she couldn’t rouse herself from a daze when she was awake. She bought a pack of Peter Stuyvesants from the Shell down the road. She hadn’t smoked in years. With every inhalation she tasted poison. She got through the pack anyway. Audrey sat by the motel’s pool, sweating. Smoking a cigarette every few hours. The owner of The Mirage Inn cleaned the pool after the second day.
She picked up the phone to call her son but could not dial the number. Dan’s mother would answer and Audrey wasn’t ready for that conversation. The many comments over the years. Grandma saying how much Keenan resembled Audrey, never seeing Daniel in her grandson. The comments delivered softly, lovingly—brutal every time they were uttered. Each one, another crack in the glass, splitting and growing into a whole tree of branches and roots like she’d seen occasionally in windscreens, eventually spreading through everything Audrey saw. Maybe Dan’s mother would say, ‘Well, I knew those lovely blue eyes didn’t belong to us. No eyes of that kind on our side of the family.’ A final crack in Audrey’s glass—in the tree of fractures that had grown within the framework of her bones. Audrey put the phone down and didn’t make the call.
Keenan would be happy at Grandma’s for a few more days. He adored the old lady. A woman who loved Keenan so much she bought him clothes and toys practically every week, devoting a room to
him in her house: decals on the walls of lions and monkeys and giraffes and rhinos; leopard-skin pyjamas for a new bed with zebra sheets.
All because she had believed he was a genetic reflection of herself, even if it wasn’t something she could see with her own eyes. Audrey had spent days on the telephone looking for Daniel. Now she couldn’t pick up the receiver in her motel room to dial one number.
Was she supposed to call Dan’s mother and tell her that Keenan belonged to Audrey and no-one else in the world? If she was honest with herself, her hesitation wasn’t because she felt pity for the old woman. Audrey knew Keenan would barely understand. Also, that he would have a lifetime to remember the day his mother broke his heart. Audrey wanted to pick up the phone and ask Dan’s mother, all of that love for Keenan, was it really nothing more than genetic vanity? Was there anything left over for the boy himself?
Daniel’s mobile sat there on the windowsill overlooking the pool. It had rung a few times, friends or people at work wanting to know what had happened to him. She hadn’t been able to answer why he had disappeared, even if it felt obvious to Audrey. What else could it be other than a catastrophic mistake she had made? A permanent error that wasn’t erased because it was random and stupid and brief. Every time Audrey had said she didn’t know why or where or how, she knew the only possible answer became clearer to everyone asking. She had charged the phone when she found it, but she left his mobile where it was and let the battery die.
Audrey had assumed it was an accident, yet the phone had led her to The Mirage Inn, and this room. The photograph was for Audrey, placed in the bedside table as Daniel walked out of The Mirage Inn. Going where? Going anywhere. In fairytales, breadcrumbs were left behind when people went missing. Daniel had come to the desert and left behind these last bits and pieces of his life.
