On Brunswick Ground Read online

  He leaves and returns a minute later, just as dusk grows thicker, bearing slices of fruit on a plate. They exchange a few comments on his daughter. Mitali announces:

  ‘She’ll soon be studying again.’

  Ian nods.

  ‘And she’s sleeping better.’

  Then he turns towards me:

  ‘My daughter Billie has had leukaemia, but she’s pulling through.’

  This new shadow of death is there with the food we are sharing. Ian nudges the fruit towards us. He has long fingers that move slower than other people’s. I guess he is the one who has sanded the weatherboards by hand, spurning a power tool.

  We stay silent a few moments. The fruits are fresh and delicious, as if my tiredness itself were tasting them. Our heads are all leaning against the weatherboards. I smile at them.

  ‘Dusk is my favourite hour.’

  I haven’t made any comments on their daughter, but I am touched by their openness. Jill Meagher has died, but Billie is getting better; that’s something, I tell myself, as if I had really met these two young women, as if this information had a direct influence on my life. Immersed in the verandah’s calm, I have a strange feeling of kinship, of not sitting here by chance, of our lives’ connection to the dead.

  Then, as if inexorably, another death is exposed. Mitali dusts her thighs.

  ‘It’s over for Olga.’

  I feel Ian stiffen.

  ‘When?’

  She tosses her head.

  ‘A month ago.’

  The atmosphere alters as if someone had lashed a whip. Ian slowly puts the slice of mango he was holding back down on the plate.

  ‘You didn’t tell me – for a whole month?’

  She frowns, staring at her hands as if they were strange objects on her knees.

  ‘No.’

  Mitali stares at us furiously. You’d think that month had rebelled against her, that she had a hand-to-hand fight with every day of it.

  ‘She was already dead, wasn’t she? Hooked up on that machine.’

  She coughs. The image of Mitali coughing blood flits through my mind. Ian leans back against the weatherboards, holding her gaze. His eyes are so grave that I wonder why they are discussing this in my presence. Whoever this friend was, why did she wait so long to tell him? Suddenly I wonder if she didn’t invite me in on purpose – to keep herself at a distance from it, and bring herself to at last admit it.

  ‘Mitali, so all this time while we were looking after Billie …’

  Ian’s words just stay there. She almost snarls at him.

  ‘I needed to be with Billie. Billie’s alive. I could do something, couldn’t I?’

  It all makes sense. Jill Meagher is haunting her, not because she worked for ABC Radio, or because she was young, beautiful and Irish, but because Mitali’s unwept tears have spilled into the stranger’s death.

  When I leave them, they both walk me to the gate. The sepia evening light is already a memory of itself. A grey cat is walking in a side street along the parked cars. I see him nearly every night. His Confucian dignity is impervious to the floating disquiet. I’m at a respectful distance on the other footpath, looking at him. He surveys me with a certain tender cool. The dead recede from my mind. I am hungry now and decide to do something about it.

  I’m coming back from the supermarket, still in my muddy boots. There’s a smell of baby skin and stormy weather in the air. Then, as rain, wrapped in cloud, moves above us without falling, the footpath suddenly reeks of orchids and wine from some stone cellar. It’s about seven in the evening and even though it’s spring, it feels like winter. A few steps ahead, I recognise Sarah, the owner of the bar where I met Bernice. It’s quite dark and we could easily pretend we haven’t noticed each other. Is a bird rustling in the melaleuca? Or is there a twitch in the darkness? We both look round at the same time. Her coat flaps open like a sail, revealing a low-cut black dress and a flash of cleavage. Her hand, clasping her collar around her throat, is a tough, working hand. Yet out of that toughness, through the sleek, black curtain of her hair, through the green slits of her eyes and the panther-like shift in her shoulders, her beauty imposes itself – eerie, and Brontë-esque.

  I know her family is mostly of Irish origin, but something of the bush has settled on her. I’ve seen the giant pieces she sculpts. The white gallery they sit in is bursting at the seams with their pent-up energy. They stand gawky as cranes with thick spines, leaning, propped against air, holding invisible weights with soft rounded shoulders and a tired, spent strength. They vibrate with the spirit of this place that calls her, just as it calls the name of every street, the cry of every bird, to its secret identity.

  She touches my arm when I say:

  ‘Hello, Sarah.’

  She can’t remember my name but makes a wild guess, which ends in a kind of noise.

  ‘How are you?’ we both add in a symmetrical echo that stymies us.

  Her hands run through her hair. I can see she’s tired. Then, out of the blue, she asks:

  ‘You wouldn’t feel like a pub dinner, would you? I know it’s last minute …’

  I lift my bags of shopping.

  ‘Will you give me a chance to drop this off?’

  Sarah nods. We decide to meet in fifteen minutes. She goes and I notice the swing of her step – a bushwalker ready to keep striding for days on end, until her back, turned away from the lights of home, becomes a tiny speck. As I walk home, I wonder why last minute things make me feel so safe.

  The pub stands on a corner and I walk into its belly of noise. How will I find her? It feels impossible, like having an appointment at a busy railway station. But there she is, perched on a stool quite near the door. She nods as I climb up onto the stool beside her. A man standing on the other side is trying to chat her up and she sheds casual smiles at him. Another one rocks up and starts talking about Jill Meagher.

  ‘Bloody bastard, should have been strangled at birth.’

  Sarah’s green eyes consult mine as if bringing the bags home had not interrupted our conversation.

  ‘That poor girl,’ breathes the newcomer, with the fruity vowels of a barrister.

  He has a bulbous alcoholic nose and seems to stand upright by a small miracle, yet shreds of intelligence flit in his eyes. After a moment of concentration, he draws his faculties together and asks:

  ‘Do you think we’re all heartbroken because Jill Meagher worked at the ABC and was a cutie?’

  Sarah looks squarely at him:

  ‘Mmmm, that public outpouring of grief oddly disturbed me – a bit of a Princess Di response. Why did the public choose to grieve this time? Why does the press earbash us about it? Was it because she was like us, but better – middle class, bright, beautiful … It could be more about class, than about the visceral, emotional reaction this spontaneous march would have us believe.’

  Her comment reminds me of the other crime Mitali told me about, the Indian man who killed his wife and then burned them both in their house. No mourning marches for her. With a smile too ripe for words, Sarah tips her head sideways and flicks a look in my direction.

  And what’s your take on that? asks her silence.

  I can’t find a word to say. I understand what she means but I don’t think of Jill Meagher as a public sacrifice, some inverted scapegoat, beautiful rather than ugly, deformed, or simply more ordinary. All I can think is why was she killed rather than any one of us, any woman here, with air in her lungs, a smile on her face and a glass to her lips? The man stares at me as if I really had said something, his agile mind lurking behind the alcohol. A moment passes between the three of us – a clearing – as if, with the sum of our thoughts, we’d just glimpsed some invisible thing beyond us, hanging in the air for the taking.

  Then he scrunches his eyes, grabs his drink and lifts it like a hurricane lamp before retreating. But suddenly his steps lag, and he sways back towards us. I find myself staring up into his face. His whisper barely reaches me.

 
‘I was in the same bar on the twenty-first of September. I saw Jill Meagher on her last night alive.’

  He is moving away hurriedly now. Sarah has not heard. Only the stranger is told, the one with the accent, the one who will go and carry the secret overseas where it can be forgotten. I am not going anywhere, but I have no one to say it to, and it feels sacrilegious to comment on it now. Just as sacrilegious as if I were to speak to Sarah about Mitali’s feelings on the subject. It seems that everyone in Brunswick has some connection to Jill Meagher’s death, his or her own ken of bereavement.

  Hunched over her food, Sarah eats with pioneer moves. Tough and precise with her fork, she cuts her meat with a frown, eats slow and speaks fast between mouthfuls.

  ‘I feel incredibly sad for her and her family. I’m not just saying this. I have a daughter. I have a mother in Adelaide. I also have a drunk barrister, a house painter, a photographer, an academic, a builder, and a pole dancer – all these people give the best of themselves as they drink their worries away.’

  Sarah’s eyes are her giveaway. There, in the green, she can’t hide some unshareable suffering. When I stare at them, I feel we’re all Jill Meaghers; any one of the women in this room could be lying in her shallow grave. The common coin of fear and pain makes us the same as her. The baker in Pagnol’s Baker’s Wife pops into my mind and I quote him to Sarah: ‘Only rich people are cuckolds. I’m not a cuckold. I’m unhappy.’ Just as Jill Meagher is no Lady Di, rushed off to hospital in an armada of French police cars.

  That’s when we see Bernice. She’s standing on a table in the middle of the room, drunk as a lord. Sarah drags her lips back and leans on her forearms. I glance round again. Bernice is now singing to the orchestra in her head while a table of people try to humour her. The whole pub has a weather eye out for her. She’ll be right.

  Sarah grasps her own strong hands and smiles at me wryly.

  ‘I’ve been to an opening today. That’s why I’m dressed like a woman. It’s like being a fucking drag queen,’ she snorts.

  Maybe arresting looks ‘arrest’ their possessors, making them painfully unaware of their own attractions – the mirror opposite of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’ The gazes of men lace the air around Sarah, but she’s oblivious. She’s pre-disappointed about the outcome of any possible affair before anyone approaches her. It’s impossible to imagine her interested in women. I’ve seen the erotic frescoes on the walls of her bar’s toilets. They are resolutely heterosexual. Yet she remains a cloistered mystery.

  Does every person in Brunswick need a mystery to survive? Brunswick, I’m told, is transporting its mysteries north to Coburg and Preston. Those who paint, sing or write can’t get reasonable rents anymore. The yuppies are moving in with their Bugaboos. I glance in Bernice’s direction again. Someone is helping her step down from the table to a chair to the floor. She looks ready to be wheeled home in a Silver Cross perambulator. But she is ordering herself another glass of wine.

  Sarah has been in Melbourne for years, but was brought up in Adelaide, where her elderly mother still lives. After studying in Melbourne, her daughter, Mary, decided to settle back in Adelaide. She is partnered with a Muslim, has no children – and wears a full-length burqa.

  ‘Not easy, especially in a country governed by a woman,’ Sarah comments, before adding:

  ‘Shopping with her can be a bit of a challenge. And she’s so unreasonably beautiful, you wouldn’t believe … There’s something about her face that stops traffic.’

  I think, No wonder, with the mother she has.

  Sarah makes a face.

  ‘When I go and stay with them, I have learnt not to interrupt him.’

  ‘Have you asked her why she needs to do this?’

  The green eyes flicker at this.

  ‘She probably doesn’t want to make waves in her relationship. She’s sailed into this lock, stock and barrel. I try and forget I’m a feminist when I’m over there.’

  Her lips extend in a smile.

  ‘I try real hard.’

  ‘What’s her partner like?’

  Sarah puts her glass down; her green eyes get greener.

  ‘I don’t like him one bit. It’s not even about his religion. He’s an opinionated arsehole on any subject. It’s always something I’ve done or something I haven’t done.’

  This is no unburdening. Words drop from her nervelessly like gloves chucked on a table.

  ‘I was a hippie parent. Share houses, arty-farty, shifting jobs.’

  I shift on my stool. I wonder if her mother and her daughter are close, living as they do in the same city. Sarah answers my thought.

  ‘My mother is in her late seventies. She endures life rather than lives it. She and my daughter Mary have always got on. Maybe they’re both fundamentalists.’

  She snorts and smiles at me squarely.

  ‘Women’s lives fester, don’t they?’

  I ask her mother’s name.

  ‘Helen,’ she says.

  It sounds final. As if she were referring to the Trojan War.

  ‘She’s got a cancer now and refuses chemo and radiation. She thinks her age will keep it at bay.’

  We look at each other. The way Sarah presents it, it doesn’t feel like an illness or a medical condition, but more as a chemical reaction between their two natures.

  ‘She’s just roughing it with this wacky old naturopath down the road, thinking she can be as stoic with her cancer as she is with her life. She wrestles with it like Jacob wrestled with the angel.’

  Sarah laughs a short, dry laugh.

  ‘I made a sculpture of Jacob wrestling with that man who wasn’t a man, but a demon lover, a doppelganger, a conscience gone feral. Just like a cancer, really.’

  Her head ducks but she continues talking.

  ‘On my last evening in Adelaide, I was having dinner with my mother, then Mary waltzed in with her burqa. Helen the pioneer, Mary the Muslim and Sarah the arty feminist. Jung would have had a field day: a gang of archetypes all talking about nothing.’

  Her shrug is the saddest thing of the evening. It reminds me of the cat.

  That cat looks like he misses something or someone. His step can never be the same, as if he knows that what he loves is not coming back. The knowledge of it is in his body like a poison, floating in his throat and his liver, changing his chemistry, the taste of his food – destroying his habits, leaving him in a sea of minutes where every decision of his day bewilders him. He isn’t lonely; he just functions in a kind of living pain. I feel I know that grey cat well – intimate stranger, foreign friend.

  I ask Sarah if her daughter Mary ever comes to Melbourne.

  ‘Never,’ she says. ‘I always have to go to her. It’s all right.’

  It doesn’t feel all right. There’s something open-ended about our conversation, as if words were just signs in front of what was really going on.

  ‘Couldn’t you invite her to stay with you for a few days?’

  Sarah’s eyes flash, in hope or in anger I’m not quite sure. Before she can answer me, there’s a cry. Bernice has just seen us. She wades through the air of the pub to reach us.

  ‘I should be going home,’ she announces in a loud whisper.

  Sarah and I exchange a glance. We have finished our dinner, so we fix the bill and get up with her. It’s much colder than when we walked in. The night air pierces our coats with icy kisses. We frogmarch Bernice back to her place, Sarah on one side, me on the other. There’s no option but to get her home. She trips and stumbles and bares her soul. We know she won’t remember anything tomorrow morning. She’ll saddle herself with her clothes, grab her tiny bag and go to work at Triple R, Melbourne’s independent radio station.

  Bernice twists her tear-stained face to each of us in turn, her whole body flailing around as she explains how her ex-husband dumped her. She dreamed of a white wedding and got it. She proposed on the day Labor got in, but still he left her.

  ‘Why does this always happen to me? With e
very man?’ she wails.

  Her head jerks around as if men were lurking in the bushes. Sarah’s friendly silence and my squeezes on her arm are not much help. Our footsteps echo on the empty street. Sarah asks how long ago her husband left.

  ‘Four months,’ says Bernice.

  Her baby face is freeze-framed in panic. The date hits her as if she were hearing it for the first time all over again. Sarah shoots me a look that says: Women’s lives fester.

  We get to her home. With quaint dignity Bernice refuses our offer to help her to bed. She waves us away – a soldier’s wife with no soldier to say goodbye to, a girl on a quay waving blindly to tier upon tier of uniformed shoulders under strained, hopeful smiles, all leaning elbow to elbow over the rails of a battleship going off to war. She can’t recognise her soldier, yet he’s still there, so close … Four months ago, say her eyes, I was a wife.

  I wave and wave until the street swallows us, and then Sarah and I are engulfed by a particularly big development that looms over Lygon Street. They’re building all over Brunswick. The work in progress is spiky, ghostlike, with chains hanging on scaffoldings and warning signs in red letters. We could be walking into the false memory of a war zone. Soon people will be parking their cars in the underground parking and being borne up in lifts to their apartments. They will turn their new keys in shining locks and step onto plush carpets. But for the time being, it’s Beirut. We walk away from its shadow and reach the cat’s street. I tell Sarah about him as we stroll towards it – but he’s not there.