By Garry Disher
You try to ignore disturbances of sound and light beyond your window glass because you could easily take a gun to the people from the Flamingo Gate townhouses across the street and whenever Liz from next door catches your eye she cavorts on the footpath. But a car alarm has sounded. The woman from two doors down is getting into her red Saab. She likes to wear summery cottons; pale blue today, a full, 1950s style with a broad black belt. According to Liz she is very quiet. Her name is Marion. She paid two hundred and five thousand. You watch her rummage in her lap, straighten, put on sunglasses with both hands, and push her hair behind her ears. She has been in the sun. With her hands up like that, a thin gold chain has dropped to her elbow. She reaches out for the door handle and the chain slips to her wrist again. With those looks, Liz once said, the rest of us might as well give up now. She closes the door and drives away. The street is quiet. Something about her walk and the set of her head these past few mornings tells you she has an apprehension of eyes at her back.
You return to the Apple and edit a media release for a client and fax it through to him. A shadow falls on your desk. Liz is making a maniacal face. Her nose is flattened to the window.
You open the front door and she walks in, saying, ‘Can you lend us five dollars?’
You follow her into your room. ‘Just till tonight,’ she says. ‘I need it for the tram, and my lunch.’
She sits on the ergonomic chair and regards the blinking cursor on the screen. She types: Memories are made of this. She pushes herself away from the desk and turns the chair around on its castors. She is tall, hectic, tensely boned at the neck and shoulders, but her face is always drowsy and quiescent. In hot weather like this she wears sandals, harem pants and short-sleeved shirts open over singlet tops.
Your wallet is in the bedroom. When you get back to the front room, you see that Liz has keyed in another message. She is standing at the window, looking across at the Flamingo Gate townhouses, her palms on either side of the frame.
She turns around to face you. ‘Thanks. I tried Marion, but she wasn’t home.’
‘She left about half an hour ago.’
‘What was it this time, a little silk number?’
You hesitate. ‘A little blue number.’
‘Blue. Have you talked to her yet?’
‘I’m working up to it.’
Liz sighs. She puts her hand to her chest. ‘Love blossoming. Right here in my street.’
When she’s gone you look at the screen. It reads: Catch me if you can.
* * * *
When the two teenage boys pass across the space where Marion’s car had been you focus on them and not the other things and understand that you should call D24. You press B and listen to the ringing tone. A is programmed with your sister’s number. You have not programmed the other keys. A man answers and you tell him you suspect that the flats opposite yon are being burgled. ‘When I say flats, they’re more townhouses.’
‘Yes, sir. Your name and address?’
You say, ‘They went down the side where the pool is and over the wall.’
‘We need your name and address first, sir.’
From the names on the spines in the bookcase you give him Ross Macdonald. He asks you to speak more clearly. He asks it again when you give him Allen Street and a model number from a software disc.
‘Now, sir. Describe what you saw.’
You tell him that two youths carrying green and gold nylon sports equipment bags and dressed in multicoloured board shorts, white T-shirts and, you think, gym boots, had emerged from the shrubs in the garden of the front townhouse and climbed over the bluestone wall at the side of the whole complex, tossing their bags over first.
‘You said a pool,’ the man says.
‘Where they climbed over there’s some sort of recreation area with an indoor heated pool and a spa and a sundeck, then a couple more townhouses. They’re still in there.’
‘Someone will be along soon.’
‘The place is a warren,’ you tell him.
By soon they do not mean within ten minutes, so you find yourself taking an idle stroll in the sunshine, down Allen to Frome, right, and right again, a generous circuit that takes in three sides of the townhouses. At the far corner you hear whispers in the shrubbery and a bag being zipped. You stroll on; you’re just some guy on his way to the milk bar.
But you’ve raised the temperature for them. And now the muttering sky conspires. The HELM Lager airship is prowling the air currents above the Carlton Gardens. Its white flank passes across the sun. The shadow is on you then gone again like an eye blink. Inside the Flamingo Gate they will be pulling back, retreating for cover among the courtyard trees. You sense this in a tingle of solicitude.
On the way back you pause at the entrance to Allen Street. They have sent a Falcon van with twin blue lights clamped to its roof. A policeman is facing the Flamingo Gate, his hat tipped back, his hands on his hips. You mutter: ‘You can’t afford it, pal.’
Behind him a second policeman has knocked on Marion’s door and is turning away to knock on Liz’s. Yours will be next. He catches your eye. You walk on.
They have not blocked any of the exits. They have not bothered to go in. In the milk bar the proprietor’s daughter, who is rarely at school, gives you change for the Red Phone and you tell D24 that you happened to be passing some flats and saw kids breaking in.
‘Your name and address please, sir.’
You look up. The daughter is near the Coke machine, picking at the split ends in her hair. The old woman, the grandmother, is watching you from her chair in the corner behind the wire bread racks. You turn away and say: ‘There’s a police car there, in Allen Street, but it’s a big place, lots of exits, goes through to the next street.’
‘Hold the line.’ The voice returns and says, ‘The officers attending have been notified again. Thanks for your cooperation.’
Before leaving the milk bar you stand in front of the old woman and ask for a Dutch wholemeal. You have never known her to speak or to move. The daughter hurries around from the cash register, her smile asking you to understand about the old woman. You part the plastic beads in the doorway with the bread and step outside. You are a block away from Allen Street but you can hear the squealing tyres.
* * * *
You give them half an hour and then go in. Nothing. No broken glass, no scuff marks.
The only thing is a notice taped to the outside of the steamed-up glass doors leading to the spa and the swimming pool: Flat 12 reserves the rec. room for a party starting 8.00 p.m. on the 24th, thank you for any inconvenience. You write on it: ‘Don’t you mean sorry?’
Just as you are emerging onto Allen Street from the courtyard, Marion pulls up in her Saab. She gets out and locks her door. It is too late for you to slip back into the courtyard. You begin to pat your pockets for your keys. ‘Short cut,’ you tell her, jerking your head at the Flamingo Gate.
She pauses to regard you. In one hand she holds the hooked end of a wire coathanger on which hangs a narrow black dress sheathed in plastic wrap. She has been to a hairdresser. She has a fringe now, springing free as though charged. Streaks of white have been pulled through the straw colours. The air around her is scented. You distinguish dry-cleaning fluids and shampoo above the day’s toxins. She is half-smiling, waiting for you to go on.
You gesture with your arm, expressing the geography of the area. ‘I hate having to go all the way around.’
She says, ‘At least you walk. I’m too lazy’
Her voice is a low, mild growl. She folds the black dress over her forearm. You notice how well shaped her hands are. The fingers are long, the joints narrow and supple. On one finger she wears the kind of old ring passed down by mothers and grandmothers.
‘You missed the drama,’ you say. ‘Police cars, the whole works.’
She inclines her head, telling you to go on.
‘Break-ins,’ you explain, pointing to the Flamingo Gate.
‘Did they catch them?’
You tell her you don’t know, you only heard about it.
Suddenly she stiffens. ‘Twice where I used to live,’ she says. ‘Hold this.’
She thrusts the black dress at you, unlocks her front door and disappears inside. You wait. The door has been varnished, not painted. Two frosted panels are set in it. Your own front door is painted the period red and Liz’s the period blackish-green popular when the houses were built. You support the black dress by the coathanger, letting it follow the shape of your body. You don’t want to drop it. You don’t want it to wrinkle. You look down the length of it.
Marion appears in the doorway. ‘I didn’t mean you had to wait out here. My kitchen could be crawling with hoons.’
It is cool and dim at the back of her house. You stand with her on the slate floor, looking through the glass door at her garden. Her face is close to the glass. ‘There,’ she says, pointing.
A terracotta pot lies on its side under her Japanese maple. It is broken. Black loam and geraniums have spilt onto the red-brick paving. She turns away. She wrinkles her nose, as though suppressing mirth. ‘Liz’s cat? Here, I’d better hang that up.’
She takes the dress away and when she returns you see that she has taken off her shoes. This gives her a challenging, flat-footed, skirt-swishing way of walking. ‘I see you in the mornings,’ she says, ‘out of the corner of my eye.’
Your voice catching, you tell her you work from home; the front room is your office.
‘How inspiring for you,’ she says. ‘All our sleepy faces in the mornings, plus the lovely Flamingo Gate.’
You say, ‘There’s going to be yet another spa party over there tonight.’
Marion mimes suffering in the heat. She pulls at the front of her dress. ‘We’ll have to get ourselves invited sometime.’
* * * *
The day is on the turn. The air is laden, the city waiting for a healing wind. At home you close your windows and curtains, tugging at the heavy insulation backing wherever you see a chink of light. You stand for a while in each room. In the bathroom you open the mirror door on the medicine cabinet. One full and one half Valium remain in the foil-and-plastic strip.
Later, when Marion leaves again in her car, you cut through the townhouses to the Safeway on Drummond. Frozen pizza, a spray can of touch-up paint, Earl Grey teabags, laundry powder, other things.
* * * *
Liz crosses into your backyard from hers during ‘The 7.30 Report’ and lets herself in the open French window. She has your five dollars but now she wants to borrow your dress shirt, dinner jacket and bow tie. She has been invited to the Women’s Ball. She is dressed in scarlet tights and a neon-green tank top. She has very long legs. She expands in your house. She says, ‘Crossing to Paul Lyneham in our Canberra studio.’
You turn the sound down. When you come back from the bedroom, she is on one foot, her hands on her hips, pointing and coiling a shimmering leg. She relaxes immediately, fishes a bow tie from the clothing bundled in your arms, and holds it up. ‘A clip-on? Is there style anymore?’
‘And these.’ You spill the shirt studs, in an expensive glitter of ebony and gold, into her palm. A bruised, lazy smile grows on her face. She sways. She draws down her eyelids.
‘The police were here this morning,’ you tell her.
‘I know, Marion told me. I found jemmy marks on my back door.’ She places the black tie at her throat. ‘Our Marion thinks you’re—what was it?—very serious.’ She pirouettes. On her way out she points and winks at the television set and says, ‘Good point, Paul.’
Their sound system is apparently inside the pool room, for you cannot hear the music, only bass notes that reach you like repeated explosions underground. Guests come and go in the starlight on the sundeck. You took the Valium with a Scotch boost at eleven, when you got home from visiting your sister. At two, when a Silver Top rapped its horn, voices came through the darkness, inviting the driver onto the sundeck. There have been other taxis and cars.
Liz comes home at three. She prowls about in her Volkswagen, searching for a space. When you realise she has begun a set of manoeuvres outside your window you snap out the lamp. You continue to hold Paris Trout open, as though reading it in the dark. You began it at half past one. Its air of dread has leaked into the room.
Liz locks her car. ‘You awake in there?’ she whispers, close to the window box.
You lie still, waiting for the double click her front door makes, and then put down the book. You stretch out on your back, your head on the pillow. Paris Trout believed that he would be shot from below. He clamped a lead plate to his bed base. Over at the Flamingo Gate they are winding down, for you cannot hear the bass percussions any more. Cars start. People call goodnight and one or another of them cries ‘Born in the USA’. It is a caste mark, a password, a trace of the night.
At four you peer through the curtain. They have switched off the sundeck spotlights. There are no cars that you do not recognise.
You dress in black: jeans, T-shirt and black Chinese slippers. You push your thumb against the pouring flap on the box of laundry powder and when that doesn’t work you cut the perforations with a knife. You shake-stir the spray can of paint. It rattles like a defective clock.
You partly open the front door. A distant siren, a cat in the alley, the police helicopter probing the alleys of Fitzroy with a searchlight. You open the door fully and retract the tongue on the deadlock. With the laundry powder and spray can in one arm, you step out and pull the door to behind you. It looks securely shut now. You can feel the day’s heat still locked in the brick wall.
Liz says: ‘Let me guess. Indiana Jones?’
‘Shit.’ The ball-bearing clatters in the spray can.
‘Balmy night; Liz says, ‘you know, thought I’d sit out here for a while, and look what turns up.’
She is sitting on her front step, drinking from a champagne glass. Her face is mask-like, white with exaggerated black eye sockets. Her forearms rest on her knees. You realise that she is wearing the dress shirt and underpants. Her long feet are bare. She is sniffing.
‘Have you got a cold?’
She rubs her nose. ‘I did a line of coke.’ She looks at you, at the laundry powder, spray can and concealing black clothes. ‘You do this often?’
You crouch on the footpath next to her gleaming legs. The streetlight outside Marion’s house is flickering a little. It has attracted a mist of summer insects.
‘All right. Be mysterious.’
‘How was the ball?’ you ask.
‘The ball. Your tux was a great hit. Everyone loved the studs. I outdid myself in outrageous behaviour.’
‘Good.’
She throws a pebble. It pings on the wheel trim of someone’s car. ‘But I blew my chances, didn’t I? She storms off home, and now it’s welcome to avoidance city.’ She knocks you with her knees. ‘Come on, tell us. Are you the graffiti phantom?’
You gesture at the townhouses. ‘It’s about the sixth time they’ve partyed on all night. No consideration. We’re supposed to grin and bear it.’
Liz leans back, assessing you, then sways against you again. ‘You little bugger. Let me do the paint.’
She takes the can from you and uncoils from the ground. You follow the long white shape, the erratic tick-tock of her. Outside Marion’s she begins to skip and swoop, her arms outstretched. You have an intimation of something. But then she beckons. ‘Come on,’ she calls, leading you by the hand into the grounds of the Flamingo Gate.
She enters the wrong path. ‘This way,’ you say, pulling free your hand and leading her to the left, between small ornamental trees and across beds of bark chips bordered with volcanic rock. She says, ‘How come you know all this?’
The wooden steps leading to the pool room are sodden. One door is ajar and condensation streaks the glass. The air is heavy with odours: chlorine and alcohol and heated water. There is a gentle splashing inside, as if a row-boat is pushing against tiny waves. The lights are off but the pool is illuminated by the laneway streetlight, suspended beyond the streaky glass like a faint new planet, and you can see that Marion is preparing to dive again. She is naked. She is as wet as a seal, her hair water-darkened. Her limbs close like a fisher-bird’s as she strikes the water. Liz has seen her too. She steps by you into the pool-room and waits at the pool’s edge until Marion has surfaced and returned. They watch each other. Liz is the first to move. When she extends her foot and smooths away the strap of hair adhering to Marion’s cheek, it is as if she is erasing a brush stroke.