Eyrie (2 page)

Safe. All he wanted. Was to be safe. In his flat. In himself. So he kept at it. Until he was satisfied. Reasonably, moderately sure. Unable, at least, to detect a hint of urine. Or faint notes of puke. Or any other bodily fluid.

Thank God. Thank Ralph Nader, Peter Singer – the entire sandal-wearing pantheon. Comrades, he was in the clear. Which solved nothing, of course, but you had to hold onto any little triumph that came your way, didn’t you? Yes. Yes, yes, yes. For three seconds Keely was exultant. Until the thought sank in. There he was. A middle-aged man of moderate intelligence, nuddied up and egregiously hungover. Almost high-kicking and spangle-tossing at the prospect that he had
probably
not gotten up in the night, off his chops on the fruit of the Barossa, and pissed on his own floor.

So. Elation departed in haste. And dear God. Here it was. Whatever it happened to be. There on the carpet. Evidence that his inner Elvis had surely left the building.

And now, next door, as if feeling his misery in the ether, the demoniac started up for the day. No you don’t, she said through the thin wall. No, you won’t. Never!

No, he muttered bitterly. Probably not.

He was hungry.

He poured himself a bowl of muesli and champed away penitently, not taking his eyes from the stain. Nah, that wasn’t urine. But if he was wrong, on a February day like this, his sanctuary would soon reek like a Marseilles pissoir.

After two spoonfuls of Swiss chaff he gagged and conceded defeat. He required an improper breakfast.

Regardless.

Immediately.

A
long the open walkway of the tenth floor, on the eastern face of the building, all doors were shut and most curtains drawn against the sun, so there was no one to greet, nothing to be said as Keely made his way towards the lifts in the roasting wind. To steady himself he gripped the iron balustrade. The metal was lumpy from decades of paint, as scaled and lime-caked as the taffrail of a tramp steamer. Hauling himself along it he felt the full span of uprights begin to vibrate in weird sympathy, humming louder with every step until it seemed the building and the surrounding streets were speaking across each other. Down there it was a mash of idling buses, cooling stacks, car alarms and feral screamers. Behind, below, before him, the air sawed and seethed. Good Christ, the heat, the cacophony – they were insupportable. But he had to get out, pull his mind away from what he didn’t understand, couldn’t fix, had to let slide.

At the lifts he hunted a bit of shade, which meant the grungy stairwell. While he waited, the croon and chirp of little kids rose from the convent playground across the side street. Rugrats having at it – this was the sort of noise a man should never tire of. But in truth it was getting old. Even child’s play sounded sinister after a while, something else to steel yourself against.

And now his heart was in his neck again.

And where was the bloody lift?

He wondered if it was possible he’d left his door open last night, just flaked out and left it ajar in the smothering heat. Maybe some nutjob had snuck in for a laugh, to mess with him, give him a fright. No shortage of scumbags in the building. But the door wasclosed when he went to bed. Wasn’t it? Pissed or sober, he was veryparticular about locking up. Anyway, it was shut when he woke. If someone had crept in, seizing the moment, taking advantage of his temporary lapse or possible derangement, they’d pulled the door to on their way out. From what – good breeding, pity, regret? There was no sign of any other mischief. They’d taken nothing. Not that there was much to take. He had no enemies here. That he knew of. He kept to himself. Studiously. No one, not even family, had crossed the threshold. So the thought of a lurker there while he slept, someone hovering in the hot darkness, watching – it went through him like a colonic twitch.

The lift was mercifully empty. He travelled unseen and uninterrupted to the ground floor. Let the lobby doors roll back. Took it full in the face. All that hideous light. Walked out like a halfwit into a bushfire.

He didn’t even know where he was headed. Discovered himself walking the wrong way, for one thing. It was hot enough to kill an asbestos sparrow. The concrete forecourt livid, the street branding, blinding, breath-sucking. Acid light plashed white underfoot, swashing wall to wall, window upon window, and he waded in it a moment, tilting spastic and helpless, so suddenly porous and chalky it was all behind his eyes in an instant, fizzing within his skull until it rendered everything outside him in flashes and flickers. No gentling tones out here, only abyssal shadows or colours so saturated they looked carcinogenic. Keely glimpsed, gasped, fought off the dread and gimped on gamely, but he didn’t see the bodies on the pavement outside the Chinese joint until he’d almost trampled them.

A girl hunkered in the busy foot-traffic beneath an audience of women who bickered with such conviction they had to be relatives. All of them fat and angry, red-faced, sniping. The girl herself was changing a baby’s nappy in the street; a hot, shrieking girl-child on the bare concrete. And as he pulled up, sculling a moment, disoriented as much as obstructed, he felt the clan stiffen, saw them scowl as if preparing to fend him off. He hesitated, sought a course around them, as the oldest, a stout and ugly woman, bunched a Kmart bag and shoved it beneath the infant’s head. In nearly the same moment the squatting mother shot a glance upwards that seemed directed solely at him. It may only have been a glance of shame or even defiance but to Keely it felt like hatred and he turned aside as if struck.

He angled away into an oncoming torrent of pedestrians, all boiled faces and beetling sunglasses, a surge of elbows, phones, smoke-puckers and semi-syllables within a fug of sweat and warring perfumes. He yielded towards the road’s edge where buses shuddered and gulped at the kerb. A skateboarder swept past. The street pulsed and roared as he fought for a bearing. Target, pharmacy, real estate agent, bank. Fuck, he was listing, yawing, hopelessly self-correcting. It was more than he could manage. Any second he’d capsize.

So he lurched into the closest entry. Coles. Safe harbour. Obedient glass doors, airconditioning, muzak. Went deep, headed instinctively for the fluorescent headwaters, seeking cool air and cooler still, until he found himself in the produce section, staring at spears of Peruvian asparagus in slender, uniform lines of pale green. They were only cut vegetables, for Christ’s sake, and cheap imports at that, but there was something lovely and clement about their serried ranks and pastel colour, and now that he noticed it, the entire refrigerated colonnade had over it a misty sheen cool enough to make a Celt weep. Moist, clean, unending blur. Beneath the muzak, a special kind of quiet. Silent gusts of respite. And such calm, such unpeopled order. He caught himself fighting the urge to lie down there in the lee of these wafting cabinets and sleep till dark. Just him and poor Karen Carpenter. Him and the clean pine crates and the Pine O Cleen disinfecant and those vegetables to which clung the last faint odour of something like life itself. He imagined it, thought better of it, then discovered himself on the lino, being stood over by a woman with spectacles and brown fists. She seemed distressed, even angry, but she was being perturbed in a language he didn’t speak yet. She pointed at him excitedly, bleating and toothbearing a little before she began to hammer with some emphasis at the steel cradle of the impressive tomato display. But his cheek was cool against the floor and he couldn’t quite feel the immediacy of her concern. And then she was yanking at him without fear or favour, and he was on his feet, alone.

Maybe this was what it was like to die a little, to feel shriven, rescued, redeemed. Having your collar pulled, your fucking beard tugged by the roots until there you were, upright and guiltless, watching your irritated saviour scuff away in Third World footwear, pushing a loaded trolley.

Becalmed. Adrift. Summoning a bit of puff.

He ghosted through the aisles accompanied by the sad, sweet Carpenters – who he hoped were now both safely dead. For his peace of mind. For their own good.

Finally, for the sake of propriety, to feel in charge of himself once more, he made a few purchases. The steadying force of retail.

This. This. That, whatever it was. Couldn’t afford any but he bought them all.

Going through the motions at the checkout helped a little, but it occurred to him – winked like an oil light on the dash – that he really could be losing his mind. And that couldn’t be all his fault. Surely.

The change. Which he accepted graciously. Along with the girl’s limp smile of boredom.

And there he was, successfully transacted, having paid dearly for his little digression, his minutes of stunned mullethood, hoisting this clammy bag of unnecessaries, suddenly aware again of how eerily hungry he was and why he’d ventured out in the first place.

He craved a couple of Bub’s fluffy double-shots. But he’d never make it to the Strip. He lacked the loins, pure and simple. Only a trek of three hundred metres or so, but out of range today. He was rogered. Unless he chanced his arm somewhere here in the refrigerated mini-mall. There was a nook of sorts beside the Cut and Blow. Yes, here it was. With malarial bain-marie and plastic tables. Open to the polished concourse, so the muzak was free and endless, and the smells of burning cheese and scorched hair roiled like confluences about the vinyl palm tree separating the two establishments. What the hell. Time to experiment. Necessity being the motherfucker of whatever is in its way.

Took a little round table. Pressed his thumbs, like his very own executioner, to his temples. Ordered something that sounded safe enough. And took stock.

Usually – on his standard wasted day – he’d walk an hour, take a swim, lounge at Bub’s and dodge certain faces by judicious use of the menu or a reiki tract left by some wide-eyed chump. All the while convincing himself that despite appearances his days retained a certain functional coherence. That was an effort, and today such feats were beyond him. He felt peeled, without defences. He was not himself, not even the remnant self he’d been yesterday afternoon. Maybe it was just the bad start. The nasty fright. Which, of course, would turn out to have a simple explanation. But the town felt hostile this morning and the world past its modest boundaries without pity. He could feel it pressing hot and breathless against the glass doors in the distance. Or perhaps that was just weather.

Besides, it was pension day. The fortnightly full moon. Twelve hours of tidal chaos. So if he really wanted to press on further from home in search of better fare and more congenial surrounds, then he’d have to run the payday gauntlet between this little granny mall and Bub’s. And that was a lot of crazy shit to get through. For that you needed skin. Ramrod will. And funds. Because before you even got to the corner there were toothless winos and humbugging Aborigines, each with a case to make and a cloud of misery and body odour to drive it home. Once you’d fought your way clear of the bottlo and the junkie park, you’d need to penetrate the phalanx of charity-tin rattlers skulking soulfully in the trinket alleys and shady arcades. And what could you do but honour their efforts, sign their petitions, fork out the shekels while seething? He gave bogus addresses, snail and email, and hated himself for it. Their causes were just but doomed.

Thank God they were all so fresh and endlessly replaceable, these kids, because they almost never recognized him. What could you tell them, these smiley elves from Oxfam, Greenpeace, or Friends of the Forest, what could you honestly say? It killed you, the bright-eyed marsupial innocence of their faces. No. No sir. Not today.

And even if he did make it that far without falling over again or yacking on someone, he’d still have the buskers to deal with. They were worse than any charity picket, more offensive and evil-smelling than any derro or waistcoated do-gooder. These talentless nitwits were the final obstacle between you and a fistful of arabica beans. And by the time you reached them you were already punch-drunk and desperate. Without discrimination or pride. So there you went, most days, creeping past the tattoo dens and incense emporia where they lurked, steeling yourself to stride by solemnly but almost always ending up shelling out like a man envious of the higher gifts. Just to get by, just to be left alone, just because you felt sorry for the same three chords about the usual damage done.

After all that he’d finally totter onto the little avenue of self-congratulation that everyone called the Cappuccino Strip. Fifty umbrellas around which a certain civic pride once rallied. In the seventies the Strip had been a beacon of homely cosmopolitanism, a refuge from the desolate franchise dispensation stretching from sea to hazy hills. But that was before it calcified into smugness. Somewhere along the way the good folks of the port settled in the wisdom that coffee was all the culture and industry a town required. Butcher shops, hardware stores, chandlers and bakeries had steadily been squeezed out and surplanted by yet more cafés, new spaghetti barns. Rents were extortionate, house prices absurd. The city had become a boho theme park perched on a real estate bubble, and behind every neglected goldrush façade and vacant shopfront was a slum landlord counting pennies, lording it over family and bitching about refugees.

Freo,
mon amour.
It gave him five kinds of sulphuric reflux to think of it. Didn’t know how he could still love it so. Tried to tell himself at least it wasn’t Perth, that pastel toy town upriver. But, Christ, that wasn’t saying much, was it?

No, this sad little caff would have to be it today. He was physically infirm and psychically unable to go any further. He’d sit tight and watch the trolley-boys trundle by, the parched oldsters wheezing in from Centrelink and Culley’s on their walkers, the rat-tailed infants chucking tantrums on the shiny tiles. He could bear this. Couldn’t he? He was here already, he’d made his order. He was all set. And yet he could not rest. For the mind charged on, cataloguing the horrors he’d spared himself. The manky footpath jewellers, the already drunk Irish backpackers, the mouthy schoolkids.

Still, when he beheld his breakfast on its sunny yellow plate, his resolve began to decay. He couldn’t help but think of properly fried bacon, of hash browns and fluffy free-rangers, of a coffee upon whose bronzed
crema
a spoonful of sugar might wallow, like a cherub upon a cloud. As he struggled with some aberrant species of ham-and-cheese croissant that clung to his gums like denture glue, he began to wonder if he might just man up after all and make a dash to Bub’s. Well, perhaps not a dash. A power shuffle, a wilful creep.

Hell, yes. And he was bracing against the sticky plastic in preparation for a slow-motion getaway when he remembered the time. It was witching hour on the Strip. That meant yummy mummies. Über-matrons. He couldn’t abide them. Or resist them. They’d see him off in a heartbeat. Without even noticing him. Without registering his feeble presence. With their hulking all-terrain strollers and jogging sheen, their kooky ethnic headscarves and gleaming thighs, they were enough to make a man kick a Buddhist. Late morning they ran in packs, descending upon the quarter to circle their wagons and colonize entire cafés for cistern-sized lattes and teeny-cutesy babycinos. There was something loathsome and luscious about their fruity chirrups, their sweet-smelling sweat, their mist of satisfaction. Not content to be healthy and handsome, they had to be cruelly ravishing. And Jesus, even Leni Riefenstahl had spared us lycra.

Keely’s contempt and lust were no match for them. Which was why he usually went early. To save himself the suffering. So that was that. Here he stood. Sat. Wrestling his greasy bolus. Sipping this bituminous brew. Having barely gotten change from a tenner. Let no man say he didn’t keep an open mind.