‘They’ve got a witness, says she saw you near Mickey’s on the night.’
‘That’s impossible. Perhaps she saw someone she thought was me.’
‘She’ll say she saw you on another occasion having an argument with a man about a parking spot.’
Sarah frowned, touched her mouth.
‘Did something like that happen?’
‘Yes. Months ago. This bastard nipped in behind me and took my park. I was reversing. I was enraged, I got out and he told me to piss off. I wouldn’t let him get out of his car. Finally, he got scared and reversed.’
‘We’ll have to get back to this, it’s not good,’ I said. ‘Tell me about the bruise.’
‘What?’
Sarah lifted her chin, took a drag, her eyes were on the ceiling, showing her neck, a long column and pale, tendons showing, a shadow visible on the right side.
‘They’ll say you got the mark from Mickey.’
We sat in the sagging Swedish Modern chairs, looking at each other, hearing the sounds from the world outside, muted by distance and obstruction but still hard and clanging.
The cigarette was over. She got up, went to the stove, opened the door and tossed the butt in.
‘I’ve often had bruises,’ she said.
I waited, drank some more beer. There was a new noise now, a siren, intermittent, a lonely sound. Sarah turned.
‘I was unloading some stuff from a truck last Wednesday. A bit slipped, caught me in the throat.’
She unzipped her right sleeve, showed me her forearm. On the intimate inner-arm skin below the elbow was a lavender blotch. ‘I bruise easily. Banged this against a piece of scrap yesterday. Hardly felt it.’
The siren had stopped. The other noises had gone too, as if its mournful wail had been a signal to desist.
‘You came here after court?’ I said.
‘I’m not letting this fucking unbelievably awful bullshit take over my life. If I don’t carry on as normal I’ll lose my mind.’
‘Andrew will want you to testify,’ I said. ‘It would be best if he knew about anything that might be damaging.’
Sarah sat down, sank into the chair, legs apart, held the bottle of Dresdner Pils in both hands. I saw the tiny pinch of flesh between her eyes.
‘It’s not a pure and holy life,’ she said. ‘I got a conviction for possession. Just dope. Andrew appeared for me. I don’t think he remembers.’
‘No surprises, that’s what makes a defence lawyer happy,’ I said. ‘Drew wouldn’t want you remembering anything under cross-examination.’
‘Such as?’
‘An extreme example would be a similar death of someone else close to you.’
Sarah closed her eyes and shook her head, slowly, as if in pain. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’
‘You said you had a break-in. Where was that?’
She opened her eyes. Hazel would be the colour. ‘Where I live. At my father’s townhouse in St Kilda. I suppose break-in isn’t the word. There wasn’t any breaking.’
Goodbye, German beer. I drank the last centimetres, put the bottle on the table.
‘There were odd things first.’
She shifted in the chair, moved her head. ‘About six weeks ago I noticed a woman and then I saw her again, three times in about ten days. Each time she dressed very differently. Her hair was always different.’
‘Did she want you to see her?’
‘No, it wasn’t stalking. The first time she was leaning against a car talking to the person inside, then she was on a mobile, the other time she was in a car across from the gym. She never looked at me.’
My position in the chair was causing pain in the lower back. Could Swedish melancholy be chair-related?
‘St Kilda,’ I said. ‘I’m told it’s like a village. Friendly street prostitutes always ready to lend a hand, the milkman carries emergency coke. You’d expect to see the same people, wouldn’t you?’
She smiled, not a complete smile. ‘I’ve even got a friendly neighbourhood peeping Tom. Anyway, I didn’t see her again.’
‘After you told Mickey about her?’
‘What?’
Cold was rising from the concrete slab. It had reached my flabby calves, less flabby than before the morning running, perhaps, but not the calves of a young tennis player.
‘You didn’t see her again after you told Mickey?’
‘I didn’t tell Mickey,’ she said. ‘Sophie told him. She was with me the third time. She actually took a photograph of the woman.’
‘She happened to have a camera?’
‘She always has a camera.’
‘Has Sophie been questioned?’
‘She was at a party. She has about fifty alibi witnesses.’
‘Tell me about the break-in.’
Sarah put out a hand and picked up a watch, a cheap digital item on a plastic strap. ‘Jesus,’ she said. She stood up fluidly without using her arms. ‘Can we carry on tomorrow? I’ve got to get home and clean up, I’m meeting my father at six.’
I got up too, not fluidly, I didn’t know how to exit a 1950s Swedish Modern chair with grace. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow night,’ I said. ‘We can find a time that suits you.’
I gave her my card and said goodbye, walked back the way I had come, around the downed knight in his pool of harsh light, around the steel scrapheap, between the execution and the crawling, panting pack of dog-humans. Finally, I passed by the witches preparing to cook a small creature and came to the sliding door and opened it to the dripping world beyond.
6
Upstairs at the old boot factory, home, I put on lights, heating, walked around, drew in the dust on the mantelpiece. I looked out of the window at the pencil lines of rain across the streetlight, moved books from one pile to another, washed the breakfast things, turned on the radio, the television, switched them off, got Schubert going: Winterreise.
The music soothed places in the mind. I poured a whisky and soda, sank into an old leather armchair, the repaired survivor of a bomb blast that disintegrated its two companions and a sofa, bought long ago at the Old Colonists’ Club dispersal. Isabel had done the bidding, she had the ability to wait, to move in the smallest increments, to reveal nothing. That was the side of her that made her good at the law, at poker. Her other side cared nothing for calculation, for economy. Without reserve, that side gave away money, time, attention, love. She ministered to her clients, to her untidy siblings, to total strangers. Once a week, she drove across the city to take a steak and onion pie to an old man met at a tramstop who had trouble remembering her name.
This wasn’t the time to think about Isabel. Food, I would think about food. I got up and went to the kitchen to study Linda’s donation. Meat, vegetables, cheese. At the Victoria Market, she always bought indiscriminately and extravagantly. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ she once said. ‘The vegie man says he loves me, I’m radio spunk number one, bugger the Italian woman on ABC drivetime. Do I say, Thanks, Giorgio, all I want is a big red pepper?’
‘A big red pepper, no,’ I’d said. ‘You don’t want to inflame them further. Better to buy a dozen flaccid cabbages.’
Thinking about Linda, I lost interest in cooking and went back to the sitting room. The phone rang.
‘Ah, for once found without twenty attempts.’
Cyril Wootton, the plummy tones, made plummier at this hour by his refreshment stop at the Windsor
