A SOFT PATTERING SOUND AGAINST AN upturned plastic bucket beyond the bedroom window peters out. Jovan notices the drizzle of rain only when it begins to ease off. He’s been dozing. Acid trickles through his veins as he wakes. It’s the reason Jovan rarely takes afternoon naps. The five- or ten-minute spells of unconsciousness he gets when fatigue overwhelms him are never restful. He keeps his body still. His limbs ordered. Palms folded atop his chest. Eyes closed and teeth unclenched. Breathing in slow, measured intervals. His heels balanced on the crease at the end of the mattress.
The house is empty. It sounds abandoned and feels hollow in a way only Sundays can. He swings his legs over the edge of the bed and blinks, waiting for the acid to leave his blood, hoping it’ll be sooner rather than later. Checks the clock for the time. Twenty-after-seven. Ten minutes before Suzana comes home from Black Rock. There’s a house out there she’s regularly attending to now. Not just cleaning—some cooking is required. A dinner tonight for the Coultas family of Prospect Grove that has her coming home so late. Seven-thirty, she said. Often, it’s later than promised. “Promised” was too strong a word for it. He wasn’t sure what word he should use.
While he waits for his nervous system to ease up, he watches Charlemagne stroll around his yard, roaming through the lemon trees and across the dry grass. The dog sniffs at a turd some eight centimetres long. One of many that Charlemagne has already left out there on Jovan’s lawn over the last few weeks. When they’re dry, they’re easy to scoop up with a shovel, but the days get away from Jovan. The grass doesn’t need much cutting at least. It’s an Australian type that creeps across the soil in a lattice rather than growing from individual blades. Perhaps it’s a weed that merely looks grasslike. Or maybe the grass evolved in this country to survive the regular droughts. Charlemagne stretches in the middle of the yard and opens his massive jaws for a huge yawn.
“Just look at that thing,” Jovan murmurs, feeling a burble of laughter dissolve in his chest without surfacing. “That’s a big fucking dog.”
Charlemagne is a shaggy behemoth, almost as tall as Jovan when he leaps up to put his paws on his shoulders. Children stop mid-stride when they see the dog. Heads stop talking in their cars and slowly turn as they drive by. Over a metre high at the shoulder, Charlemagne is about as tall as a good-sized pony. Obviously he eats about as much as one as well.
An Irish wolfhound, his neighbour told him, when he came searching for his dog the first few times. A man of inverse proportions to his dog. Silvers would never have been big and, as he ages, seems smaller every year. More frail and withered, though he isn’t out of his fifties yet. There’s a slight depression above his right eye and it extends across his forehead and over the top of his skull. The circular shape marks an impact, the same way as the surface of the moon reveals an asteroid strike. A car crash years ago means Silvers trembles almost constantly and speaking more than a few sentences can often be difficult. Many words are impossible to say.
Silvers can still read, he assures Jovan. In the local paper there’s usually something Silvers can share with his neighbours. Most of his neighbours don’t want to speak with him for any length of time; some of them even swear at Silvers. Jovan talked with him for a while yesterday about the boy who caught a barracouta off the pier. Silvers told Jovan he has fishing rods that he hasn’t used for years, just sitting in his garage. Jovan explains he’s never been fishing and wouldn’t know the first thing about it. Silvers can’t work out where the pier is. He knows it’s not far away; within walking distance. He can’t remember which road leads to the ocean, so he wanders around the few streets he does know, and talks about barracouta with neighbours he catches when they’re getting out of their cars.
They shake hands every time they meet in Jovan’s drive. The small man puts out his jittery arm, giving him that one word to go along with it every time. “Silvers.” For a while Jovan thought it was a greeting rather than the man’s surname. His first name was only discovered by Jovan when Silvers’s wife came looking for him, and apologising for Charlemagne’s human-sized shits on the Brakochevich front yard. Looking for Bob again. And aren’t their names also in inverse proportions? “Funny,” murmurs Jovan again. “Look at that monster.”
A few minutes later Silvers stutter-walks into the yard across the road, and picks up the garden hose. Turns the tap on and starts watering the grass going blond in the Australian summer. No one around here seems to care about dry grass and mostly they let their lawns get what water they can from the skies, so Silvers goes from house to house in his neighbourhood watering the dying lawns.
Jovan sits on the edge of his bed feeling the acid run out of his blood. He can take deeper breaths now.
Memory of comfort, how easy, how quick, I forget myself.
When he comes out into his front yard it’s with his shovel and Charlemagne is happy to see him. He follows Jovan around as the shovel moves in swift slashes across the dry grass. Before he’s halfway though cleaning his lawn a car pulls up into the drive. A beat-up navy-blue Datsun 260c, as much of a bomb as Jovan’s panel van. The psychologist gets out of it. He’s told to get back in and park it in the street.
“Sorry. My wife come home soon and I want her to park on driveway,” Jovan explains as Dickens hobbles over. “What’s wrong with you legs?” Jovan asks.
“Ah.” Dickens waves his hand. “I fell down some stairs. Otherwise I would have walked here. I walk everywhere usually. Anyway, Friday morning I’m coming down stairs I’ve walked down three or four times every day for the last ten years without incident, and I missed the top step. Tumbled all the way down. Hurt my neck and coccyx, bruised some ribs, and sprained an ankle. My GP told me that I should consider myself lucky I didn’t break my neck. I felt I was unlucky to have tumbled down my stairs in the first place. You would have laughed if you saw it. It’s pretty disturbing to fall though. My first thought as I started to groan was an accusation, and a feeling of anger. I don’t know at who since I don’t believe in God. Certainly not a prankster god sticking out a foot when I wasn’t watching. I sometimes suspect that there is an atavistic blueprint for the mind that no matter what we do, we can’t really alter. Which is to say, two thousand years of social evolution and generations of civilisation is a layer as thin across the psyche as the skin on boiled milk.”
Jovan steps back with fingers passing across his forehead.
Dickens leans forward slightly, saying, “I’m sorry to go on. I had a second cup of coffee today, and I really don’t think I should drink any coffee at all. I saw this experiment once, when they gave wood spiders various drugs like cocaine, heroin, THC, LSD, nicotine, etcetera, etcetera, to see the effect on this phenomenal web builder of a spider. Interesting results, though I don’t know how controlled the experiment actually was. In any case, the fascinating thing was that the wood spider given caffeine built exactly the kind of web he would have built without the caffeine, except very quickly. The actual effect on him was the most dramatic of all. I mean, more than cocaine or heroin. The other wood spiders continued to function after building their bizarre, drug-induced webs, but the caffeine spider went into a rocking, semi-catatonic state after completing his web. In human terms you could call it a complete psychotic breakdown. Oh my God! That thing’s coming at me! And I’m sore already. Don’t let it jump on me!”
Dickens is stumbling back as the Irish wolfhound emerges from a possum hunt in Jovan’s backyard. The psychologist falls onto his bruised coccyx with a yelp.
Charlemagne stops and looks up at Jovan as if to ask, What’s the deal with this guy?
“This is friendly Carlo. He won’t make you any pain,” Jovan tells David.
“Jittery, I suppose, after what happened. And I won’t sleep tonight,” Dickens says getting back to his feet. “I keep forgetting how addictive coffee really is. It’s the commonplace nature…”
“You did not come for this,” Jovan says. The Irish wolfhound stands beside Jovan, leaning on him. A hand unconsciously reaches down and plays with the folds of skin at the dog’s throat.
Dickens looks at the two of them, rubbing his lips with the back of his hand, and then says, “I take it you’ve heard about the optometrist.”
“Yes. Very sorry for her.” Jovan felt little about the incident. Having spoken now though, feels the words thump into his heart, the ghost of a train suddenly rattling through with all its carriages and then vanishing and leaving him feeling the same kind of nothingness again. That feeling was the lie. The truth was the train, loaded not only with Miss Richards and her small sad decision on the Hallam platform, but with others seen through the glass, blurred with reflections of Jovan and Suzana, and so many others still waiting at the station. The numbness of a long wait.
Purgatory is a nothing, fear is a nothing, love is a nothing.
Dickens leans forward, reaching out a tentative hand to Charlemagne. “We can’t attribute the action entirely to her exposure to the graffiti. Clearly a tipping point was reached.” A drizzle begins to descend in a mist, evaporating before it gets to the ground, warm from the day.
“Was it killing herself? Maybe she fall over. Or something else. Pushed by accident.” They move beneath the foliage of a silver dollar eucalyptus growing in Jovan’s front yard.
“Did you see the eye charts?” Dickens asks.
“Yes.”
Dickens blinks. “Do you have the eye charts?”
Jovan nods.
“Is it possible from what you saw? Intentional, not accidental.” Jovan shakes his head. “I am very surprised.”
“Is it as simple as reading the message? Perhaps it was a part of it. What about the invasive nature of the act—the particularity of it. Everything else so far has been broad range. For anyone that came across it. Here we have a specific target for a message. And that target is dead a few days later. It certainly seems a related sequence. What do you think?”
“He knows her very well.” Jovan shrugs, feeling tired and dazed. “Maybe. But he does not push. He has an instinct for how to find pain. This doctor with needles.”
“Acupuncturist.”
“He finds the nerve that hurts most and uses needle for ice.”
“Ice pick.”
“He is not planning the place like Hallam. He is not a mastermind from a bad grade film.”
“B Grade. There’s A Grade and there’s…whatever. It’s not Bad Grade.”
“Enough with help. If you understand, nod your head. Or keep your mouth close for more than a minute. You don’t catch flies in your mouth.”
“Sure. Sorry.” Dickens rubs the hand that touched the dog on his pant leg. “I would very much like to see the eye charts, if that’s convenient for you at all.”
A few moments ago Jovan had been in his bedroom. Dealing with a chattering psychologist sky-high on caffeine wasn’t a pleasant way to wake up.
“As well as the eye charts, she find the body with the message cut in chest. Maybe this have effects,” Jovan says.
“You didn’t see the Inspiration cadaver yourself?”
“No.”
“Did they take pictures?”
“What you think?”
“Of course.” Dickens squints in embarrassment. “I didn’t know the optometrist found the cadaver. Do you think that’s what made her Graffito’s next target?”
“Yes. Maybe.” Jovan tilts his head back to stretch his neck and take a breath of air. He wobbles his head left and right, blinking as though he’s just woken. “Trying to understand crazy can make the crazy.” He plucks a eucalyptus leaf and brings it to his nose. A lovely smell.
Dickens doesn’t blink or move his head. He keeps himself very still and focused. “How did she respond to finding that woman’s body?”
Jovan exhales loudly, exasperated.
“I know it sounds like an interrogation. I’m not just asking questions. I’m very interested in your thoughts. There’s a part of me that can’t believe a woman killed herself over some graffiti. A bit of vandalism. But there’s the cadaver, and you have to call that carved word a desecration. So that makes more sense. Did you see Richards after discovering that body?”
“Miss Richards always quiet. Everything was in tight jar. I think she acts like doctor, but she not surgeon and a dead body for the optometrist is dead body for the suburban person. I never see a word made into a human body this way. How do we respond? Maybe there is no respond to this.” Jovan rubs the back of his neck as he speaks, pauses as he asks his question, and then lets his arm drop.
David Dickens pats the giant dog’s head very lightly, pretending to touch him as much as anything. “I might write a book about these events. I’ve even made a start. It’s early days and there’s many a project I begin…but you can never tell which will carry you all the way through to the end. I thought the best way to tackle this story would be from his perspective. Dr. Graffito’s eyes. Of course, I have nowhere near enough information, but we’ll see how we go. The event is in progress and it’s going to be interesting to see who this man is. One thing’s for certain: he will not stop. The evidence of his behaviour indicates a deeply compulsive personality that is only becoming more obsessive with time. Sedation and restraint is all that might be recommended. So, he will be caught. Eventually. I might get a chance to talk to him. Maybe Graffito is a way for me to investigate a range of ideas I’m already exploring, but he might also end up being the way to crystallise what I’ve been working towards for years. I can show you the intro and you can give me your opinion.”
“My opinion?”
“I mean your professional opinion.” David leans forward, arms slightly raised, suggesting an actor might emerge from the wings onto a stage. “As a professor of literature in Yugoslavia you must have assessed many a manuscript.”
“Not now. No more professional anything. I understand talking much more better than reading, especially with technical word. This way he looks…”
“Perspective,” David fills in, then raises a hand in apology.
“It is impossible for you maybe. Where does he look from? How does he look? And what you could speak for him, comes from easy explanation you have already prepared. This is…just you again. Not a new perspective.”
“I think I can find a different perspective. I don’t want to shrink him into some easy categorisation. I want to try to understand him. See if I can…”
“The rain is falling from a full moon,” Silvers says. “The water wets my face but I haven’t been crying.”
Silvers has returned to the yard after having watched the rain sifting across the lawns of his neighbourhood. Watering the grass wasn’t necessary after all and he hasn’t been called a “fucking mental,” “stupid fuck,” or “dumb shit” and hasn’t been pushed away by any of the more territorial neighbours who don’t want him touching their hoses or water to save their grass.
The full moon is clear even though the sky is still more blue than black. Silvers stands among the men as though to join the conversation, not paying attention to what they’re saying. He’s pleased to hear their voices engaged on some subject of apparent substance.
“Round moon in the blue sky,” he says into a brief pause in the two men’s voices. “I hammer it in with my eye. The head of a big nail.”
A car coasts up the drive. Jovan’s wife. The pretty lady that gives Silvers food she cooks herself—who has a cutting voice and hard sharp eyes as though she found them in broken beer bottles. Even when she smiles at him, or at his Charlemagne, or at her husband, the big man with hands twice the size of his own. The woman who never looks afraid of anything, even when he had to bring her over to the house because his Janey was so sick she couldn’t get out of bed, and couldn’t make him anything to eat, or even call on the phone for people to bring around food and Silvers had already eaten all the bread and cereal in the house. This woman with the broken-glass eyes came and made everything alright again. As though she was changing the bed. She called the ambulance and Janey came back because it had been a mild heart attack. Now Janey was always resting and she promised she would live to be a hundred and one. Silvers worries that she might not be telling him the truth and he doesn’t want to ask Mister Jovan’s wife for help every day, even though she was very nice, because he doesn’t want to look at those eyes.
Charlemagne barks and Jovan sees Mrs. Silvers making her way over. To collect her “two strays.” At the same time Jovan sees a sleek new Saab roll up behind the Datsun that Dickens owns. Tammie sits behind her steering wheel, smiling at the sample of the local community here in Frankston. She gets out of the car and walks towards them.
“Hello there. I think I’m a little lost. Not used to driving around the boondocks I suppose. I was wondering if anyone can help me. I’m looking to get to the Church of Christ. Do any of you know where it is?”
She’s looking at Jovan when she asks. He lifts the shovel that he’s been leaning on, but remains silent, watching her and the smile snaking around her mouth. Jovan smiles despite himself. It’s a good joke: the Church of Christ.
Silvers is pointing up at the moon by way of comment. He says, “It would hurt more. This kind of bright round moon. No sleep on the cross. A dark night would be better. The iron nails cannot disappear when there’s no darkness.”
Charlemagne trots over to Tammie. She gives the dog a whack on the snout with the back of her hand. A hard hit showing experience with animals and discipline.
Suzana lifts the bags of shopping she’d put on the ground and Dickens takes it upon himself to help the woman. He moves out to the kerb and begins pointing out directions and estimates of travel time.
“I’m surprised you need the address at this time of night,” Dickens says. “They’re closed right now, aren’t they? Though I don’t suppose it’s like a hairdresser or haberdashery. Actually, you must have passed it coming here, down Cranbourne Road. It’s the one with a needle on the roof. Don’t ask me why it’s a needle. Perhaps it’s a directional needle. A symbolic gesture reminding us of the Assumption or the struggling soul’s aspiration in general—”
“Thanks.” She slaps Dickens on the shoulder. Hard enough that it barely qualifies as a friendly pat. “I appreciate the directions.”
“Still, what could you possibly want at the church at eight in the evening?” asks Dickens with a polite smile.
Tammie tilts her face forward, closing her eyes. “That’s between me and Jesus.” She waves at the group of people gathered in Jovan’s front yard without looking at them again. “Shame you’re holding a shovel. If it was a pitchfork we could call this lovely little tableau Australian Gothic,” she tells Jovan, before she gets back into her silver bullet of a car.
Suzana whispers something into the cup of Jovan’s ear, and walks into the house with the shopping.
Silvers is dragged away by his wife, announcing before he leaves, “It’s a shame we don’t all live to a hundred and one years.”
Dickens returns to the motionless Jovan and continues talking about the ideas he has for his new book. The Graffiti Artist of the Caves might be a good title, Dickens says and goes on for half an hour without noticing that Jovan isn’t listening to a word he’s saying.
—
MONDAY MORNING JOVAN drives from the dentist to the hospital, pain in his jaw, knowing now that he’ll need seven fillings. Rescheduled to go in for some drilling Friday. Lucky, they tell him, to get in so quickly. A cancellation, and it could have been a month’s wait instead, and who knows, maybe another cavity. As it was, lucky number seven. Every time he got fillings they took six months to settle in, and there was no feeling lucky about any of it, anywhere in the process. Well, at least he hadn’t taken a fall down the stairs as had the Caffeine Wood Spider.
He is forced to manhandle the van, leaning into the column shift, and swinging the metal crate of a vehicle this way and that, through the alternating gliding/grinding traffic. The brakes are still spongy. Gearing down to stops whenever he can.
David Dickens hadn’t fallen down the stairs. Jovan hadn’t believed that when Dickens told the story, though he’d accepted it in the wild flow of the man’s words yesterday. The over-elaborate lie that students had tried on Jovan in the past so many times, going to ridiculous lengths to explain a late assignment. He pulls his van in and out of the combative lines of traffic.
Because another thing Dickens had talked about last night was the kind of graffiti he’d seen on trains, under bridges, on brick walls along the tracks and at train stations, and what it meant to desperately need to scrawl your name across concrete, rhapsodising about the liquid vision passing across those words and images, as though witnessing a river drowning all in a rushing anonymity. Generating questions: Why did oblivion of this kind hurt? Why did it force these boys out to the desolate concrete near the gleaming steel rails of a rapidly passing world?
Jovan considers Frankston station and what it’s like late at night. When Dickens did his research for The Graffiti Artist of the Caves. A book that was (metaphorically speaking) also graffiti scrawled beside the tracks, “and as much a response to the hurt as it is for those lost boys buying their cans of paint,” Dickens said after dinner as they walked to Jovan’s garage to see Graffito’s plates and charts.
The man with careful glasses set on his nose; those inquisitive eyes; those hippy clothes; crawled up into a ball as the youths of oblivion kicked into his legs and arms and back. Booting into the sag of an aging body. Kicking into his bald head to see it bounce. Had anyone ever really fallen down the stairs or collided with a door handle when explaining their bruises?
These thoughts shove away from Dickens and those boots crashing into his body and push instead into the traffic Jovan’s trying to get through.
Written across the chalkboard-black streets is the mathematics of chaos. Everyone going off in a million directions, scrawling their intentions in Morse code flashes and dashes, behind glass hissing at each other in the lost languages of silence, sometimes colliding and crashing into each other, mostly passing untouched across the unalterable long black mark of a destiny road through an anonymous fate.
Thinking about chaos again, and the difference between fate and destiny. Jovan wonders if he is affected by Dr. Graffito in the same way Miss Richards was. Not so simple an act of destruction. Something at least; not knowing where this will eventually lead him.
Jovan gets out of his white Ford panel van and walks through the hospital car park. He rarely spots anyone he knows from Bosnia. It seems an impossibility that someone from the life over there might pop up all the way over here in Melbourne, though it’s happened a few times. His hand is raised to the side of his sore jaw to dampen the jolts of every step. He doesn’t pay much attention to the woman pulling along a reluctant five-year-old across the shimmering concrete. He remembers how difficult it had been to go to a supermarket or get on public transport with children. Any kind of movement became a matter of logistics. A child isn’t a sack of potatoes you can throw over your shoulder, dumping it here or there. They need to be coaxed every step of the way. Their opinions of the heat taken into account. Their distress negotiated. So he smiles at the woman yet doesn’t recognise her from Sarajevo.
Silvana Pejich passes Professor Brakochevich. His smile reaches her with the force of a full-blooded slap as they pass. Manages to keep walking. Doesn’t turn around. It hasn’t been a good day for her. The bleeding over the last two weeks was the initial stages of a miscarriage, though the doctor hadn’t put it that way exactly. The obstetrician was very clear in other ways. A strict recommendation for bed rest. In effect, saying that she should stay in bed for the next six months. Impossible of course. Two wages kept them all barely afloat as it was. She feels damp. Not sure if it’s urine, regular fluid, or blood. She pulls her daughter along, promising ice cream on the way home if she’ll be a good girl for a few more minutes. Chocolate ice cream, she asks. Strawberry? she asks—so that her daughter can almost taste the reward. So she’ll keep walking and not break down and cry in the middle of the furnace out here. Six months bed rest!
Silvana doesn’t look as she did when Jovan knew her. Was it only six years ago? She has gained weight and doesn’t dress as daringly these days. Her hair was much longer then and there was that surprising beauty she used to own. Not quite ugly, yet close enough for those pressurised years of school to be an endless, slow-growing agony. Then flowering into something extraordinary in university, the bony, gangly girlhood smoothing out into graceful curves and gentle sways of loveliness. Or so the boys seemed to say with every glance her way. Their mouths were often far more crude. She preferred to keep in mind the lingering gaze of adoration when she passed. Hair down to her hips. All her movement keeping to the rhythm of a dance she had finally discovered. A radio station she never knew was there, playing in the background of her mind all the time. Making her feel plugged in. That she could move along with any kind of bustle, not getting knocked around anymore at all. Grades beginning to slide towards failure because of all the things she wanted to be doing. The ways she preferred to spend her time, waltzing along from one lovely moment to another. Student life in that university would have challenged the most ascetic temperament. She’d had enough years of boredom and silence in Mostar. Feeling the hectic, brutal old movements in the background. Not too far away. So near at times. Kept her moving very quickly. For the first time discovering that there was power in the world that didn’t belong exclusively to politicians and soldiers, that she could find and use some of it herself. That she enjoyed the new power she had, simply because she’d grown up into a woman that people thought was beautiful. Yet there would always be an awkward girl within, looking on with mouth agape.
“Have you even fucking read the damn book Silvana?” Brakochevich asked.
She blinked. The lie. It didn’t matter what she said, she realised, so she didn’t bother with the excuses. “I’ve always liked you Professor. It would really be my pleasure, you know. It wouldn’t be an effort making you happy.” She got up, moving around his desk, and let her body find its new rhythm, showing him all the things it might do for him. That it could bring him such joys. Bliss would last longer in the next few minutes than it had ever done before. It would resonate long after she left his office. Unbuttoning her shirt and lifting her skirt, already within her groove when the silence came through a ringing slap. For an instant, she was totally awake. Nothing had changed. It was just Silvana—alone in the world. Her professor standing before her, his huge hand returning to his side. No indication that he had struck her. He might have waved away a fly from his face. Sitting down at his desk. Arranging paper. Picking up his green-ink grading pen. Silvana knew that he’d been careful. Only the fingers had connected. Not the full weight of his massive hand. She wouldn’t have been left standing otherwise. Thankful for his restraint.
“Read the book. Get me that assignment by the weekend. I don’t want to hear, or see, anything else from you. Now get the fuck out of here you silly little girl.”
Silvana reaches her car and opens all the doors to let the heat out. Her daughter says she wants butterscotch ice cream, the same as you get at the movies. Six years later and she can still feel that Sarajevo slap.
—
“WHAT ARE YOU doing here Joe? I thought you were at the dentist this morning?” Mr. Sewell, Jovan’s supervisor, stands at the staff entrance, dropping his smoke, crushing it with an old black shoe. The sole looks paper thin.
“This was a plan. They check today. Scrape my tooth clean…teeth. So nothing, until Friday. Arvo Friday,” Jovan says.
Mr. Sewell nods and lights another cigarette. He smokes, watching the cars circle in the car park, slotting into a space as soon as it opens up. A grimace every time he draws in his tobacco. Smoking as part of some grim duty.
“It’s a fucking nightmare out there.” Robert Sewell raises a chin at the cars, all in some kind of commerce with illness or death. Depositing their wounded and maimed, picking up their leg- or armplastered kin, the all-too-glad-to-be-escaping visitors. A woman in her nineties, trying to exit her spot without turning her head; her handbrake on.
“Maybe you should have gone to the beach,” Sewell tells Jovan. “Why do I find that hard to imagine? You ever go to the beach with your wife, Joe?”
“We should go more times,” Jovan says, not sure what Mr. Sewell is thinking, standing in his worn-out black shoes. What he sees out there, and why it makes him draw on his cigarette with that ugliness around his mouth.
“Me too. I don’t have a wife though. It’s good to have one when you’re contemplating a jaunt. That’s a word you might not be familiar with. It means to get out there on the spur of the moment. For the hell of it, you know. Have a picnic by the Yarra or the Melbourne Botanical Gardens. My parents used to get into that. They never did the traditional Christmas or birthday bullshit. A BBQ by the river was always a brilliant idea. Not only on the twenty-fifth of December. You and your wife should check out The Botanical, Joe,” he says blowing smoke at the cars. “Me and Gillian moved all the way out here and never got out anywhere when we were married. We forgot lots of great places and things we used to do, like the jaunt. Used to seem too far away every time we considered it but it’s really not a long drive to the Botanical Gardens.”
“OK. I’ll get address from you.” Jovan takes off his sunglasses and moves towards the door.
“But that fucken van of yours, mate. You can’t take a woman anywhere in that. A woman doesn’t want to feel as if she’s a part of the equipment.” Jovan lets out the first breath of a chuckle—knows from previous experience that his supervisor is quick to begin talking from his loneliness. “You can borrow my car, mate. I’m not saying it’s a luxury vehicle but it’s got air con and a great stereo system. I listen to most of my music on the road.”
“Thank you. Maybe we have some time soon.” Jovan makes a move for the door.
“No new graffiti.”
Jovan stops, his card held above the swipe-scanner that will unlock the door for him.
“Maybe he’ll stop now. After Hallam,” Mr. Sewell says.
Jovan turns around. Waves off the proffered cigarette. It was as if Mr. Sewell didn’t believe him when he told him he used to smoke—that he no longer did. Every time they saw each other the pack of smokes came out and he would urge Jovan to take one as though there needed to be a reason for the two of them to be standing together, having a conversation.
“Not a generosity to welcome a friend to poison,” he says in Serbian. In English, “No thank you very much.”
“Life could go back to the way it was.”
“Maybe, yes,” Jovan says.
“You don’t think that’s likely?”
“This going in one direction. Worse. And more worse.”
Sewell remembers to blow the smoke away from Jovan as they stand at the staff entrance. He’s about to raise the cigarette again when he says, “Look at that old woman, struggling to get out of that spot for the last ten minutes. Her windows up on a day like this. I hope she’s got air con. What do you reckon? Is it nice and cool in that piece of shit Mitsubishi Colt?”
They watch the old woman, shrunken white head on stiff shoulders, swivelling in confusion. Two hands that have seized the steering wheel, unable to let go. Not being able to negotiate the tight spaces and narrow angles that will allow her to get out. Jovan swipes his card to release the lock.
“I’ve already given you the day off, mate. It’d take you five minutes to walk down to the beach. Why don’t you go down and have a swim?”
“Maybe you should go water, Boss.”
“Me? What would I fucken do in the water?” He smiles. “And I hate smoking on the hot sand. You can’t get any satisfaction from a ciggie at the beach.”
“I go work now.” Jovan smiles at him with his hand to his jaw. “I have this pain. Not so easy to relax in sun.”
“OK mate. I want you to go straight up to maternity. Nurses up there complaining as usual. Can’t ever be clean enough for them.”
“Life go back to way it was,” Jovan says with a smile. Sewell blows more smoke at the carousel of cars out in the car park. The old woman has released herself from her purgatory. Jovan swipes his card again and enters the hospital. He hears Sewell behind him say, “Who knows what the fuck that looked like anyway?”
Jovan descends the stairwell and opens a door that will lead him past the laundry rooms and then on into the change rooms. He stops by a sign above the largest of the immense industrial washing machines. Made to look like a regular sign that might have been up on the wall for decades, except it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. For one thing it’s in German, Arbeit macht frei. Dr. Graffito’s work. Perhaps it was new yet Jovan is certain it isn’t. It hadn’t grabbed anyone’s attention. It is a failure for Graffito. Maybe his first piece. Surreptitiously placed on a wall. No one noticing it for months. Derivative. Uninspired. Before he started getting creative. Before the mania really took hold.
A middle-aged Hungarian lady in her white cleaning uniform unbends from a washing trolley and gives him a malevolent look. He points up at the sign, to indicate he wasn’t watching her bend over. She doesn’t look. She walks away mumbling something in her language.
Another woman in the white cleaning uniform, a dinky-di Aussie, with that broad type of English he can barely understand, is returning from a break, and stops beside him. She’s gazing over to where he’s pointing.
“How long has that been there?” she asks. He shrugs. “What’s it mean?” Her voice rises from the gut. Always comes with a heavy swing to it, as if she’s using her fists as much as her lips.
“Work is…work make you free,” he says.
“Huh! That’s bullshit if eva I heard it,” she says. “And why’s it in Croatian?”
“You mean Serbian?” he asks.
“Same difference.” She looks at him as though he’d climbed down a ladder after having hung the sign. “Why’s it up there?”
“It is German.” He takes a step away from her. “And I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. Of course you don’t know. But you’ll stand here looking at it like it’s the Mona Lisa.” That last, MownahLeesuh, comes out as nothing Jovan can identify.
“This is Dr. Graffito. You know, the graffiti we have been having.”
“What, he’s a Kraut, is he?” she asks as she walks back to her work station. “Huh! Should’a known it’d be a foreigner.” She turns on her iron, and starts bringing out the white coats of doctors she’ll be ironing for the next few hours.
—
SUZANA IS STILL in the house when he wakes. Jovan stumbles out, eyes refusing to operate properly. She’s got the coffee on. A pile of French toast. Cinnamon on the table. Broke-open eggs in a bowl, ready to be poured into the pan. The smell of coffee squeezing his stomach tight and then releasing, opening a vast space of hunger.
“Not working today?” Jovan mumbles through a thick mouth, slumping at the table; hands scratching through his hair and then rubbing at his face.
“Is that disappointment in your voice?” She puts down her book. An Ivo Andrich collection of short stories in English he bought her on her first birthday in Australia. To practise her English with something familiar. Turned out an annoying hurdle for something too well known. Unused until now.
“That’s fatigue. And my eyes—not being able to open them—that’s age. The stumbling around for half an hour before the coffee kicks in, that’s death.”
“Hey. That’s not funny. Not fucking funny.” She rises, waving her hand at him to dispel fate-tempting words. She switches the gas flame on and strikes a match. Waits a second for the pan to melt some butter.
“No, I save the funny for the dilemma of the toilet on this kind of morning, an erection and a full bladder.”
“And now disgusting. The scratching of your arse, that’s just gross.” She uses the English word, gross, like a cliché teenager from an American film. She pours a dash of milk into the bowl of eggs. Swishes them around a few times (Jovan’s preference).
“I might want to do that, scratch my arse, yet I resist that temptation in your presence, because that’s love.”
“Love in refrain. Sing me a silent song darling,” she says. Presses her mouth closed afterwards. And he doesn’t speak because it strikes him as unusual, these days, that she’d even speak of love in jest. Fear struggles up out of his intestines and freezes his lungs into a gasp that she doesn’t see, and he’s able to swallow it with some French toast. Maybe because this is the first time they’ve talked this way in years. As though nothing had happened and they were allowed to be themselves again.
The familiar silence goes on now.
They eat. She reads her book and Jovan looks out the window.
They’re surrounded by trees. Down Reservoir Road, the street they lived on, was Jubilee Park. In their elms and the park’s pines and gums, vermillion birds were leaping around from branch to branch. Brilliantly coloured ones they call rosellas. Australian birds, he thinks. About the most beautiful birds when they’re seen altogether. A neighbour, Mister Karistianos, breeds them. Cages and sells them sometimes. He prefers to sit on his front porch these days throwing them seeds as he listens to classical music on the radio. It seems a shame that the music comes through a small speaker, from a cheap stereo the size of a hardback book, that he’s owned for a decade or two. Orchestras had produced the music in concert halls.
“I had this dream last night,” Suzana says, bringing over the plate. He’s putting the piece of French toast he’s taken from her plate into his mouth.
“What are you doing? There’s plenty of toast in front of you. Why you taking it from my plate?”
“I don’t know. I thought you were finished.”
“In the first place, that’s revolting. And in the second, damn strange behaviour. Why would you do that?”
“There was something appealing about your bite marks in the bread. I don’t know. Move on. Tell me about the dream.” She sits there looking at him, shakes her head.
“I was back in Belgrade. Walking along Kalimegdan. I used to do that in my angsty student days. Anyway, it starts snowing, and I’m bothered by that because I’ll be wet by the time I get to my car. I’m dressed for summer. A dress I got for my birthday; from you. The one I had to wait six months to wear because you bought a summer dress in winter.” She gives him a look with the pause. “Then it really starts to snow, and I’m trying to make my way through half a metre of it blanketing the ground. It gets worse, and I’m panicking because I know I’m going to get covered. Suffocated. And I do. The snow falls in blankets. The suffocation is slow. When I woke, I was desperate for another breath. Snapped my eyes open, and saw nothing but white. Woke up from that and for a second still felt an oblivion of white airlessness.”
“Good dream,” Jovan comments around his last mouthful of wolfed-down eggs. He picks up his coffee cup.
“Good? It was terrible.”
“Yet interesting. I never remember my dreams because they’re too boring. I had a good one about moving to a new planet called Crumbs.”
“What happened in that one?”
“That’s all I remember. Planet Crumbs.”
Looking at the clock on the kitchen wall, she stands up.
“Eleven o’clock start for me today, in Chelsea. Jelka is picking me up. And then I’m in Black Rock again until dinner. You’ve got ham or pastrami for lunch today. I baked some bread yesterday as well.”
“Alright,” Jovan says, drinking his coffee and shaking some cinnamon onto his toast. Cinnamon was never something they used for French toast back in Yugoslavia. It’s an idea she has picked up in the Black Rock house.
Suzana stands in the doorway, watching him as he moves with sleep-clumsy movements. She looks out the window, at the garish birds that drive her crazy with their ceaseless squawking and twittering.
“I want to have another child,” she says.
He looks over at her, his face immobilised. He turns his body towards her, a slight swivel in the wooden kitchen chair. “Is this something you want to discuss?”
“You want another child, don’t you?” she asks with a very small question mark. It’s a statement really.
“Yes.” He swallows the piece of bread in his mouth. “I do.”
“So do I. What’s to discuss?”
“Alright,” Jovan says.
“And I want you to clean up the yard today, OK? I’m walking through a minefield every morning. Not to mention the impression it creates of our house. I mean, we live here, right?” She leaves the kitchen, saying, “Someone should put that monster dog on a chain.”
“I started to clean the lawn the other day but then the Australian came over. He wouldn’t stop talking and I suppose I got distracted.”
“You can finish it today.”
“No problem,” he says in English and doesn’t move from the kitchen table for a long time.