and Katelyn at the same time? A merchant and his stock. Merchants didn’t get attached to their stock, they didn’t collect it, they dealt in it, that was what trade was about.
Smoke of toast. Caught just in time, a little scraping would remove the toxic black bits. I put on the second round, spread butter and the mysterious black substance, Australia’s soy sauce. Since when were malt and yeast vegetables? Why wasn’t it called Maltemite? Yeastamite?
Kettle boiling. I poured water into the teapot and grated parmesan onto the Vegemite. Very good with parmesan was the mite. Bugger cheese and onion, they should make parmesan and Vegemite potato chips, now that would be fusion cuisine: Parmemite.
Detective Sergeant Reece Stedman, disgraced cop, worked for Redmile in 1994. The man in the Redmile car to whom the woman watching Sarah reported was the man who attacked me. Was that Reece Stedman sitting in the car with Donna Filipovic?
Why should it be?
Toast-turning time. Perhaps marmalade with this round? There was also a good French blueberry jam. The marmalade came from somewhere rural, bought by Linda. Tooling around the countryside in her Alfa, stopping to buy produce from desperate roadside rustics.
Tooling alone? I had done no rural tooling with her. City tooling, yes.
How could these things come into my mind? In the midst of very serious shit, body hurting, face battered, I felt a flicker, no, a flame, of sexual suspicion and resentment involving someone who was probably gone for good.
Going to South Australia. Wayne.
He had no reason to go. He could have been going further, to Western Australia, you had to get over South Australia to get there. It stood in the way, a hot and waterless piece of ground in the main, an obstacle.
Why would Wayne be going to WA? Because it was a long, long way from Melbourne?
He wouldn’t have known the way. You’d pull up at some place on the highway that offered food, go inside, you’d be eating a fat-saturated piece of fried something and looking at the map. Christ, it’s a long way, you’d say to yourself, and the stomach acid would burn in the oesophagus even before you’d finished eating.
Take out a pen, write down the distances in the map’s margin, add them up, estimate how far you could get that day. Write down the mileages from where you were to buggery in South Australia.
It wasn’t that your destination was buggery in South Australia, it was because that was the end of a stage. Because the map stopped there.
I left the table and went to the sitting room and rang Bendsten Associates, gave my name to the brisk person, Simone came on.
‘Don’t tell me this is the damn-soon call?’ she said.
‘Not just yet.’
I gave the name Dilthey in Brisbane. It took very little time.
‘Just the one,’ she said. ‘K. J. Dilthey. You do know that you can find out this kind of information yourself by asking directory inquiries? I have to charge you.’
‘I prefer your voice recognition software,’ I said. ‘Number?’
I rang it. A woman answered. I asked for Mr Dilthey.
‘He’s not really up to it,’ she said. ‘I’m the day nurse.’
‘I’m ringing from the probate office of the Supreme Court in Melbourne,’ I said, lying without effort. ‘It’s about his son’s estate. Our understanding is that Mr Dilthey is Wayne’s sole heir but we’ve had an inquiry from someone else. You don’t happen to know whether there are other relatives, do you?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘but hang on, I’ll ask the lady next door, she knows everything, been there for yonks.’
‘I’ll hold,’ I said.
I drank the last of the tea. There was a sparrow on the windowsill, pecking hopefully. I should put out crumbs. Isabel always emptied the breadboard tray onto the windowsill. Surely this bird could not remember that?
‘You there?’
‘I am.’
‘She says there’s a daughter. Teresa. She’s Wayne’s twin. She got pregnant and had a big fight with her dad and she left. She says she thinks she married him, he was a local bloke, a brickie. They left Brissie.’
‘Did she say his name?’
‘Hang on, I’ll ask.’
The sky was clouding over, platoons of puffs moving north.
‘There?’
‘Yes.’
‘His name’s Paul Milder,’ the nurse said.
I went back to Bendsten Research. ‘Paul and Teresa Milder in South Australia and WA,’ I said.
‘Hold on.’
It took Simone about two minutes. ‘There’s a P. and T. Milder in Dunsborough, Western Australia,’ she said. ‘Nothing in SA.’
I wrote down the number and the address, said thank you again. The sunlight was gone, the puff-clouds banked up, the room darker. My feeling of recovery was waning.
You don’t need to know, Barry Tregear had said. Never mind fucken certain, you don’t need to know anything.
He was right. Of course, he was right. The man slapped me at will, then he pissed on me. His piss ran through my hair, down my cheeks. I tasted it.
I couldn’t live with that. That couldn’t be the end of something.
33
Flying over land, the Bight behind us, dark blue and sullen from our great height, whitecaps like tiny teeth, I hired a car.
The doll-lipped, petulant cabin steward left off his hissing conversation with his colleague to become attentive and obliging, succeeded in cranking me up a vehicle notch, some kickback involved no doubt. I didn’t care, the whole venture was brainless enough already. What did fifty dollars matter?
The feeling of doing something stupid became stronger as I lost my way soon after leaving the Perth airport, got off the freeway and drove through endless suburbs, rows of termite-proof brick houses built on sand, all with their straggly, sagging trees, solar panels, stained concrete driveways, basketball hoops. I cursed not bringing sunglasses. The light was too bright for winter, it wasn’t really winter here, they had nothing that resembled winter, no dormant season, no time when moss grew, no dark decaying worm season when humans could stay indoors, sit before dying fires feeling cheated by fate, bad luck, bad character, bad blood, my grandfather had no doubt about the influence of bad blood. How could anyone in this climate gain a proper understanding of melancholy?
On the other hand, the locals probably didn’t miss melancholy much, enjoyed themselves outdoors all year round, wore short pants, towelling hats, sported in the warm pale-blue waters, ignored the threat of stinging creatures, shark nibbles. A lifetime of surfing was less dangerous than a single 3 am walk down King Street, Melbourne.
Eventually, and by accident, I found myself on the highway going south-west. The road was dominated by four-wheel-drives, mostly driven by impatient, angry-looking freckled men. It was a boring journey, flat landscape, sparse vegetation, turnoffs to Coolup, Wagerup, Cookernup, Wokalup, Burekup, Dardanup, Boyanup. Up, Up and Away.
Busselton was reached across what pretended to be a river, dammed near its mouth, stagnant, a suspicious green. I drove around. There was little to the town, all of it seemingly built since the 1970s: a few business streets of surf shops, two newsagents, hotels, hardware places, chemists. The seafront was largely given over to parking, tennis courts, an amusement park, a big grassed area where a man was training an alsatian to sit and stay. In the seafront cafe, I ordered a long black from a young woman with tanned pimples, streaked hair.
