On Brunswick Ground Read online

  Whenever I look at the Odd Spot, I think of Lewis. He lives with his parents and his sister in the same street as me and sometimes we have a chat on his way back from school. He always stands without leaning on anything or putting his hands in his pockets and often says a word or two about Jack – Jack who has forgotten both of us now. I don’t know why it is easy to speak of Jack with Lewis, but that is the case. Lewis has become a kind of witness for me – maybe because we can both feel his childhood seeping out of him. I am making a subterranean bet on Jack remembering us before Lewis forgets about his childhood altogether. This I also reported to Mitali in a moment of weakness.

  ‘Good job you’re not religious, you’d be taking everybody for a fucking bodhisattva.’

  She always makes me feel better. There is something in her tone that frees you from your fucking self.

  It’s peak time in Sarah’s bar. Mary and I are sitting in a booth. We have The Age open between us. We are checking out the Odd Spot together.

  A Soviet soldier reported missing during the fighting in Afghanistan 33 years ago has been found living as a healer in the Afghan province of Herat. He has adopted the local dress and profession of the healer who nursed him back to health.

  We are facing each other above the tabloid that was once a broadsheet. People can’t hide behind their newspapers anymore; they have to read this skimpy thing. Mary lifts her hand.

  ‘I always loved those stories of Japanese soldiers lost in the jungle still thinking the war was on twenty years later.’

  She points to the Odd Spot.

  ‘It’s strange reading this after Sarah’s revelations at the beach, isn’t it?’

  ‘I knooooowww,’ I moan.

  Mary shakes her head.

  ‘When he disappeared, it was tough. You can’t do anything about somebody going away and vanishing. You can’t move around it. It’s worse than an absence; it’s a dead presence, an anti-presence, a black hole.’

  Then she jerks her head as if she wants to swallow her words. Suddenly, she puts her hand on mine. She probably thinks she has reminded me of Jack. It’s a surprise because, like her mother, she’s not into touching people. Then she straightens up and faces me. I can no longer imagine her expression.

  ‘You’ve never said one word about my burqa. Thanks for that. I can’t tell you what a relief it is. People are constantly banging on about it. I have no desire to explain it to anyone. It just is. And it’s here to stay.’

  Her tone hardens a smidgen. Mary’s a living mystery on the edge of my common sense. I don’t even know why it bugs me so much. I haven’t known her that long. Maybe she has come to represent all I haven’t got a grasp on. Sometimes I dream of her. Now I put her burqa in the same bag with my grandmother and Jack’s memory – the bag where things float, invisible and pending, with no resolution. They may vary in intensity, but they all belong to the same mysterious genus. Like walking around with a drip. You can’t tear it off or walk away from it. It has to stay there with your breathing, near your heart.

  From where we are sitting, we can see a bit of Sarah, her elbow or the swish of her dark hair, a bit like details of a painting. Now we can see her sad, laughing eyes giving back some change over the counter. Mary never helps at the bar. Everyone knows she’s Sarah’s daughter, but her get-up isn’t exactly conducive to the selling of pints of beer and glasses of wine. Out of the blue, a question pops out of me.

  ‘Do you ever hear from your ex, Mary?’

  I could kick myself for asking, but it’s too late – Mary flinches.

  ‘I hear from him. We’re good friends actually. He’s a pretty decent bloke.’

  This is so different from what I expected. I nearly splutter, but instead I end up with a lame, ‘Oh.’

  Mary continues musingly.

  ‘Sarah can’t stand him. She thinks he’s a bastard. He isn’t really. He was for a while – it’s true – at least in front of her and when we were trying to have a kid. That messed up everything. We both wanted one, you see. In fact, he found out that he couldn’t either, quite recently, and phoned to tell me. Pretty fair and square on his part, I thought.’

  She stops and sighs again.

  ‘Yeah, I think we’ll be friends now. It’s funny – over time he’s been my best friend and my worst enemy.’

  A little silence floats away like a summer cloud.

  ‘He really helped me out once. I’ll never forget that,’ she adds.

  Her eyes fall on the Odd Spot again.

  ‘Did you know my father’s a landscape architect?’

  I shake my head, noticing the present tense. When do you consider someone dead when there is no corpse?

  ‘My parents did big things. When I was a kid, I made a drawing of them. Sarah still has it. I drew them both with these giant hands, much bigger than their bodies. At one point, Dad put gardens on rooftops and created parks. He worked in Germany a few times. They love his stuff over there. When he disappeared, there was an obituary of sorts in Der Spiegel.’

  There is a quiet pride in her voice, but also a kind of cool that I can’t quite figure. She unclasps her hands.

  ‘The fact that they wanted to get back together is rather strange, isn’t it? Sarah must have been eating her heart out more than I imagined for the past three years.’

  Mary bends her blue head down.

  ‘I bet she wishes she’d gone with him now.’

  Again her tone hardens a touch. I look up in surprise.

  Suddenly her blue presence is standing up.

  ‘I’d better go. Billie’s waiting for me at the flat. We’re going to see a film.’

  She waves to Sarah, and her burqa leaves the bar. I’m left with the Odd Spot. Our odd conversation runs through my head, the tone, the comments, the whole feeling of it. I wonder if either of them ever go to the last place he was seen alive – just to breathe the same air, and see what he last saw.

  It occurs to me that we really are a bunch of waiters – the woman who walks through the night to nurse her longing for her dead daughter, the grey cat stepping out at dusk, and Sarah and I. Maybe Sarah should stop waiting and do something … Then it occurs to me: why don’t I do something? Why don’t I go to Werribee Zoo? Why don’t I have a go at lifting the veil that is shrouding Jack? Why am I so bloody discreet? Sarah is serving white wine to a man in a suit – a rarity in Brunswick. His right hand is in his pocket, jingling his change; his other is curved around his glass. He holds himself erect, as if his spine were preserving a tradition that the rest of him has completely forgotten. Then I recognise him as the man Sarah and I talked to when we had our first drink together. I wonder if he is still obsessed with Jill Meagher. I move in and sit next to him.

  ‘Hello, hello, hello,’ says the man. I extend my hand.

  ‘We talked once a few months ago in a pub, do you remember?’

  You could set fire to his breath with a match. His intelligent eyes zoom in and drag me onto the screen of his mind.

  ‘Ah, yes, perfectly. You haven’t gone back to your country, have you?’

  I shake my head. He puts a hand on my arm.

  ‘I did see her at the pub that night, you know.’

  He seems to assume that I will know who he is talking about. He’s right. I do. Sarah turns round and glances down at me. Jill Meagher has sprung back into all our minds. The three of us must be back at the same spot on the merry-goround.

  The man sighs, shoving his hands in his pockets again without jiggling his change, just jiggling himself back and forth on his heels.

  ‘It doesn’t help her now, does it?’

  ‘Maybe it does. Maybe every glance has some meaning, maybe every memory is a precious thing.’

  Sarah casts me a glance that says, Too romantic, and goes back to wiping down the bar.

  She has the capacity of being totally present with zero participation. He bows to us both.

  ‘I’m Henry.’

  Sarah bows back.

  ‘How could we
forget?’

  Above his bulbous nose, his eyes twinkle. I wave as he stumbles out. Sarah nods in his direction without stopping her wiping.

  ‘Lived with his mother. She died five years ago. He’s been drinking ever since.’

  Through her clipped tones, I sense her affection for him. The bar has quietened. There is no one to replace him on the stool beside me. Suddenly there is hardly anyone in the bar – a hush. Night presses its soft, dark fingers on the rooftops, playing Brunswick pianissimo. Even the cars seem to slur past.

  I bend over my elbows and, lifting my head, look straight at Sarah.

  ‘I’m thinking of going to Werribee Zoo to see Jack.’

  Sarah grabs a glass, pours white wine in it and pushes it towards me. She doesn’t say anything. I soldier on.

  ‘It was something Mary said. I …’

  Sarah pours herself a glass.

  ‘I know what Mary said to you. She thinks I’m eating my heart out, doesn’t she? She thinks I regret that I didn’t make a move towards him then.’

  My face gives me away. I just gape at her. I didn’t expect her to echo Mary’s exact meaning. She shakes her head.

  ‘But that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for you to do.’

  She takes our two glasses and moves us towards a booth. There is a desert feeling in the air, the city is swept away, my childhood seems as distant as the Neolithic, my home and bedside photograph could have vanished from the face of the earth and all I can fathom is that wind lifting, whirling a tumbleweed or an old rag down an empty Lygon Street. I can’t even hear the odd car anymore – a vacuum before decision time. Sarah has motioned to her barman to take over. He’s a music student, reliable and whimsical – a good mix.

  When we get to the booth, a woman who works in Kakadu for the Department of the Environment sits down at the one beside us. She is telling her friend that she can’t stand the heat, but she loves the job – so she’s reading Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. The cars come back, Lygon Street’s refilled with shops and passersby, and Sarah and I end up not talking about Jack or Werribee Zoo. Instead we sit there and chuckle about the Merri Creek incident; how drenched we were and how neither of us caught a cold. Only then does Sarah shake her head and raise the subject of Marree and Werribee.

  Ten minutes later, Bernice sails in – a smooth-browed Bernice with a quieter step. I notice she’s got a larger handbag. Instead of looking like a tiny sailor’s holdall, it hangs from her shoulder securely, peacefully, without being subdued – an altogether happier bag. Prams no longer float in her conversation like brides and donkeys in a Chagall painting. Even though she’s still the same old Bernice, the atmosphere around her is so different that we blink.

  Sarah asks if she has started the IVF procedure. Surprisingly Bernice shakes her head.

  ‘No, I haven’t. It’s so bad for you anyway.’

  We both sit on our haunches, waiting for more as she slides in next to us. It turns out that the archaeologists have both moved in with her. They were looking for digs close to the city, and Bernice had two extra rooms.

  ‘It helps with the bills,’ she adds.

  Then, as if the weight of her understatement has stifled her, she breaks into her childlike smile.

  Around us people carry their drinks in silence and peace, walking thoughtfully like priests. Outside, the night is tender and young. But all I can think about is Lewis’s childhood seeping away, hour by hour, minute by minute.

  12

  JACK

  I think about it and think about it as if I were preparing myself to go to Nepal or Buenos Aires. I call both Kim and Mitali to say I am not on for tomorrow nor maybe the next day. I buy a backpack for the occasion. I fill it carefully with books and what I need. For once I don’t forget anything. I see to money and bills and put everything in order, as if I were dying. I have no hope and no expectation – I am just going. Tomorrow afternoon seems a hundred years away. I wake up too early. I get myself washed, dressed and fed. When I open the door at about 6 am, it looks like dusk rather than dawn. The air is crisp and the trees are full of warning. I step out and start walking to Jewel station.

  On the way, there are a few blackbirds under the clouds and darting red flowers flying in and out of the Moreton Bay figs – crimson rosellas. I have filled up my Myki card to the brim, so I smack it on the yellow sentinel and walk through to the platform. I stand there looking up at the sky as if it were my best friend. I trust it and trust it. I like Jewel station. It is small and manageable, but it gives off a whiff of real departure to distant lands. The graffiti on the brick wall is a musical score, scribbling down the sounds of trains on the shiny tracks as they pass. Who would not like trains? Jack, for one. The Station Agent – one of my favourite films – left him cold. This had me looking at him carefully and weighing the shape of his chin and the sound of his voice in my mind. I doubted him because I could, because in him I had found the measure of my freedom. Love is a flight from the ego after all, a flight into the unknown after that first intimation, like the first promise of distant lands at Jewel station. Yet, in the very same breath, the wandering Jew, the lost soul in you, has finally found a home.

  The train comes and I grab my bag. I choose my seat as carefully as I have packed. A whiskery young man with a guitar sits down beside me. I am ensconced like an old lady with her knees tight – all I need is a basket on my lap and a caramel to chew to completely feel the part. I can’t stop myself staring at everything: a woman’s golf hat plugged down low over her grey hair, her nose intent on escape, rearing to flee from her forlorn pose; two girls in their school uniforms giggling, their curls mingling over the same iPhone. I even scan my whiskery neighbour’s neck. It’s as long as an ostrich’s, and so young compared to his careworn face. I notice that music ages some people. Maybe they’re the riverbeds for the torrents of notes that wear them down. My brain is a video camera, swallowing every image presented to it. I wish the whole carriage were empty and I could trundle through the suburbs to North Melbourne station staring fixedly out the window. I can’t even read. I just want to concentrate on the tightrope of averting my thoughts from Jack, of leaving the veil untouched. It can only be lifted of its own accord – even the doctors say that. You can’t tug at it.

  Then my neighbour starts talking to me. He has a Dostoyevskian gaze, a Russian starets in the making, ready to murmur the perpetual prayer of his peregrinations. His small, intensely blue eyes are plugged to the air. He’s studying music at Melbourne University … His parents live in Castlemaine … His words float into my mind, just like the prams in Bernice’s conversation. I tell him I have had so little sleep that I am in a coma. He can’t sleep either, he says, running his long ribbon of a beard through the circle made by his finger and thumb. We end up having a chat of sorts with odd bits and ends. When I get off at North Melbourne, he jumps up and shakes my hand. ‘My name’s David. I like my name. I don’t know why. But I always have,’ he assures me, still holding onto his beard. I tell him David is grand name.

  Now I’m at the station. It’s not the Sydney Opera House but it has something swanlike about it. Up and down, the escalators seem to float above the tracks as the sky bends over everything with its blue winds tucked back. I study the monitors and find the Werribee line. Then, before jumping onto the train, I ask a passenger if it is the right one because I don’t trust the names of places blinking in and out of existence on the screens. We trundle through more suburbs. The trees feel slightly different, as if they were thinking different things. There is always this sense that Australian trees look back at you. I check every station so I don’t sail past my destination and I get out at the right one.

  You have to take a bus to the zoo. I ask someone where the stop is and soon I’m waiting next to a woman in platform shoes. Her two kids have to stretch their necks to look up at her. The bus rolls up quite quickly, with light ricocheting off every one of its windows. People climb down and we climb on. I buy my ticket from the driver an
d sit right behind him. When a bus was empty, Jack always used to sit at the back with a luxury of empty seats in front of us. My mind no longer shrinks from thinking of him. It’s ineluctable now, and I’m so close to the zoo that no thought of mine can spoil anything. The die is cast.

  Jack was born in Australia; he has the wide, dry land under his collar. His family has been here for several generations on both sides. His parents have a dairy farm. They make cheeses and people roll up from far and wide to buy them. His mother once painted but refuses to do so any longer. Her pictures hang around their long, low-roofed house with a lonely feel about them. They are glimpses of the countryside, as if observed from a boat or a plane, from a sense of departure, rather than from a sense of belonging. They are a last sight of somewhere. In that sense they are sad, nearly opaque with cut-off memories. Roberta is a sandy-haired, wide-hipped woman with an interrupted smile, as if she’s always reminded of something before she can really finish it. Her activity gives off an impression of vacancy, but when she relaxes there is a busy frown on her face. Jack was disappointed when she gave up painting. But he said nothing to her about it – he believed it was none of his business.

  Jack is a self-contained animal, he moves pensively, as if he’s picking his way across the bush. He’s not a farmer, but the land’s habits and voices have settled in him nonetheless. He obeys inner seasons and cycles, he follows the weather on his phone religiously, and writes his music as if he were planting crops in the right month. I love that sense of place so deeply rooted in him, yet so detached, so completely lacking the thirst for ownership. I wonder what season he is obeying now.