He watched her go, slit-eyed. ‘Old bitch,’ he said. ‘Shit I have to put up with.’
‘So there’s no family around that you know of?’
‘Nah.’
‘He didn’t come back here?’
‘Nah. I heard he dropped out of uni, Janice Eller’s mum told me that.’
I said, ‘I might talk to Janice Eller. How would I do that?’
He blinked, ran a knuckle over his pink lower lip. ‘Dead, mate,’ he said. ‘Thredbo.’
Thredbo was a one-word Australian story, a tragedy on the snowfields, a large piece of hillside coming unstuck, people dying under collapsed buildings.
‘What about her family?’
‘Only had a mum. She died.’
Not your most profitable expedition, this trip to Walkley. Nothing gained and nothing in prospect but an indigestible meal and a night in some sagging motel bed.
‘Anyone around here who’d know anything about Robbie?’
He shook his head. ‘Nah, don’t think so. This girl came up here from Sydney with the Forestry, hung around Robbo. What was her name? My mate Sim had a thing for her…Sandra someone.’
‘Your mate around?’
‘Gone barra fishin, way up there in the Territory, lucky bugger. Should be back soon.’
I got out a card. ‘I’d appreciate it if you could ask him to give me a ring.’
15
I got as far as Lithgow. I’d got as far as Lithgow once before, in the largely blank period after my second wife, Isabel, was murdered by a client of mine. At least I think it was Lithgow. I wasn’t paying much attention in those days, only sober for as long as it took me to drive from one town to another, any town with a pub to any other town with a pub. If it was Lithgow I remembered, some kind of miners’ strike was going on and, in the pub, a drunk miner accused me of being a journalist from Sydney. I didn’t deny it, didn’t care to, just had a fight with him.
No pub fights on this visit. I drove into the cold valley town, breathed the coal smoke from the fires, bought two stubbies of Boag and a bottle of mineral water from a drive-in bottle shop, found a place that made hamburgers and got one with the lot, except the egg. In a room at an unlovely brick-veneer motel, I drank the beer and ate my supper in front of a television set that changed channels on its own. Then, tired in many ways, I went to bed with my book, Dying High: Lies About a Climber’s Life, bought on impulse months before, grabbed on my way out to get a taxi to the airport. There is something about the stupidity of climbing mountains that appeals. Perhaps it’s the clinging by the fingertips to inhospitable surfaces. I could claim some experience in this area.
In the night, I was woken by the sounds of quick sex close by, intimately close, centimetres away, just beyond the plasterboard wall. Startled, for a moment unsure of where I was, saddened when I remembered, I wrapped the sour foam pillow around my head, lay thinking about Robbie Colburne. Then I moved on to Cynthia and her attacker with the Saint tattoo, drifted off, listening to the trucks hissing, groaning, whining on the highway, thinking about my life, why equilibrium escaped me, why I couldn’t find a steady state, chose to ask questions of strangers, lie down in beds too short, turn and turn again between cold, slithery, electric nylon sheets.
I rose just after dawn, creaks in my knees, happy to be going. I’d only had brief times in my life when I wasn’t happy to be going. Sneakily, shamefully happy. Cleansed in a cramped, stained fibreglass chamber, I went outside. In the coal valley, the air was freezing. White breath hung on the face of a man walking two small dogs, clung to a few pale shift-workers coughing on the first of the day. They were all I saw on my way to the steep, winding road out of the valley. There was a moment on the heights when I could look back: nothing to see, the place gone, buried in sallow, yellow dawn-mist.
On the plane home, I sat next to a middle-aged dentist from Collaroy. Shortly after take-off, and without the slightest encouragement, he told me that he was leaving his wife and two children, aged eleven and thirteen, to be with a Melbourne person he had met at a cosmetic dentistry conference in Hawaii.
‘These things happen,’ I said. Another man grateful to be going.
‘I wasn’t looking for it to happen. It just happened. Like a…like a bolt of lightning. Can you understand that?’
‘Without any difficulty.’ I got out my book, found my place.
‘Well, you don’t do something like this lightly, do you?’
‘No. You wouldn’t.’
The dentist leaned over, looked at me from close range. I suppose they get used to doing that, a life of looking into people’s mouths. After a while, you lose the feeling of intruding.
‘I feel like I’m on a personal journey,’ he said. ‘The road less travelled.’
I looked at him briefly, a mistake.
‘Know what I mean?’ he said, licked his lips.
‘Yes.’
Complicit, I didn’t say that it was not so much a personal journey on a road less travelled as a trip in a crammed bus on a six-lane freeway. All I wanted to do was read. This would stop me thinking about the distinctly unhealthy coughing note I’d detected in the port engine.
My companion went on exploring metaphors for his condition all the way to Melbourne. From time to time, I fed him a new one to keep him from asking me questions.
Home. The comforting feel of one’s own tarmac.
On the way from the airport, I got off the suicidal freeway before the tollway began, perversely took to choked Bell Street, and at length found my way to St Georges Road and Brunswick Street. It was early afternoon, overcast. I lucked on a parking spot near Meaker’s, went in and ordered a toasted chicken sandwich from Carmel, the worldly child.
‘Tell him it’s for Jack,’ I said. ‘That sometimes stops him leaving the bones in.’
‘I’ll write it down,’ she said. ‘I’m too scared to speak to him.’
Enzio the cook was subject to mood swings. From bad to much, much worse, and back. I’d almost finished reading the form for Mornington when his squat figure emerged from the kitchen, scowled at the room, came over and put a plate down in front of me: big sourdough slices containing Enzio’s secret filling of chicken, red capsicum, ricotta and other unidentifiable stuff, the whole flattened under a hot weight. I felt saliva start.
Enzio sat down, looked around, pointed his blunt and unshaven chin at me. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Hair transplants. What you think?’
‘Can we talk about this later? Hair and food don’t mix.’
He ignored my plea. ‘This woman,’ he said, ‘she likes hair.’
‘A new woman?’
‘At the market. Her husband died. She talks about his hair all the time, lovely hair, strong hair.’ He ran his hand over the surviving strands on his scalp. Unlovely, unstrong.
I looked at my sandwich. The point about a toasted sandwich is that it is eaten warm.
‘Talks where? Where are you when she talks about hair?’
He jerked his head. ‘Where you think? Where you talk this kind of talk?’
I gave him the lawyerly eye. ‘Enzio, if this woman wanted hair, she wouldn’t be talking to you in bed about hair. She’s feeling guilty because she’s having such a good time. Her hairy husband, all he had was hair. That’s all she can find to say about him. You, on the other hand, you’ve got something else.’
I paused, bent my head closer. ‘It’s not hair she wants, Enzio. Get me?’
The ends of Enzio’s mouth bent down, slowly, a sinister, knowing look.
‘Fuck hair,’ he said. He made a gesture with his right forearm that brooked no misinterpretation.
‘Exactly. Now get back to work.’
He left. In the doorway to the kitchen, he turned. Our eyes met. He gave me a confident nod. Several nods.
Next patient, Dr Irish. Would that all problems admitted of such effortless solutions. In particular, my problems. The sandwich was still warm. Halfway, I signalled for the coffee, the short signal, thumb and index fingers a centimetre apart.