But at the first set of lights I caught sight of my own reflection in the side mirror. My eyes had the intensity of a crazy person. What was I doing racing up there like that? It was coming on lunchtime, the best time of day to catch Raf. I’d waited thirty years to find my father. One more day wouldn’t hurt.
He was there. This time Raf was there, working on the tropical rainforest scene. His face was partially hidden by straight black hair flopping forward. He was dressed completely in black, apart from a dark blue velvet waistcoat with a silver thread through it.
I put some money in the upturned hat. ‘I saw your Last Supper, it was really good.’
‘Thank you,’ he said graciously.
‘What’s this one called?’
‘It doesn’t have a name yet.’
‘What about “The Garden of Agharti”?’
He stopped what he was doing. ‘You know about Agharti? So few people seem to have heard of it.’
‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘the kingdom under the earth. Do you believe it could exist here, in Australia?’
‘All things are possible,’ he hinted, returning to his drawing. ‘Thank you,’ he said in the same gracious voice as a passerby dropped some coins into the hat.
‘Is it possible for someone to live under the ground, do you think?’
‘Of course. If there’s air, something to eat and drink. In Agharti there is vril light which makes plants grow. According to the legend those people were completely self-sufficient.’
‘What about under Sydney? Is it possible to live in the tunnels under the city?’
He looked up again, starting now to get the idea that I wasn’t just a passerby asking idle questions.
‘Kerry told me you and Madalena were friends.’ He didn’t say anything. ‘Do you know where she is?’
He was colouring in an area of green, rubbing the chalk over and over in the same place, giving himself something to focus on rather than the question I was asking.
‘No.’ But he did. He knew exactly where she was.
‘Is it Fabio? Is that who she’s worried about?’ A muscle in his jaw tensed.
‘Raf,’ I bent down close to him. ‘Is she all right? Just tell me if she’s all right.’ I was as close as I could get to him without actually touching. He kept chalking in the leaf, not looking at me. Some more coins were dropped into his hat but this time he didn’t acknowledge it. I stayed in close, I could almost feel his body heat.
‘Do you know what it’s like for Madalena’s mother, can you imagine what she’s going through?’ He wasn’t answering but he could hear me all right. I squatted there for a minute more then decided I’d pushed it far enough. I didn’t want to bully him into talking, didn’t want to use any tactics that might associate me with Fabio. I stood up. ‘If you see her, please ask her to call her home.’
‘I don’t think I’ll be seeing her. Like I said, I don’t know where she is.’
I walked away. Into Hyde Park and down the path as if that was the end of it. But it wasn’t.
I waited. By the fountain from which I’d watched this spot before. He continued with the drawing, occasionally looking up and thanking people for their donations. For seventeen minutes. Then he pocketed the money and put the hat on, pushing his hair behind his ears. He stood up, looked around, then walked into the station. I made my way back and joined the trickle of people entering the station.
St James station was built in the 1920s and would have been very stylish then. The pedestrian tunnel leading into the station was done out in cream tiles with bottle green trim. Every so often there was an arched opening into a parallel tunnel, and a smaller opening at ground level, like a cat door.
Raf walked along with a light step, overtaking an old lady slowly making her way with the help of a walking stick. She kept to the wall so as not to be a traffic hazard, but nevertheless a young dude cut it too fine and sent her off balance. Right into my arms. I managed to steady her. But it had given her a fright. ‘Oh, oh,’ she started sobbing loudly. People turned around to see what the fuss was. People including Raf. I was looking straight at him. He saw me and ducked through a nearby archway. I wanted to go after him but the woman was clinging to me as if I was a life-support system. Shit. ‘It’s OK,’ I assured her, ‘just try to keep walking.’ No, she didn’t want to walk, she wanted to lean against the wall.
Of course, by the time she’d recovered, Raf had long gone. I went through the same archway into another pedestrian tunnel and followed it out to the street. He wasn’t back at the painting, there was not a sign of him. I came back into the station and looked around. He’d completely disappeared. He could be anywhere.
‘I’d like to see the station master,’ I said to one of the guards.
‘Is it a complaint?’ he asked.
‘No, not yet.’
‘Through there and up the stairs, first door on the right. You can’t miss it.’
He was right. You’d have to be blind to miss the ‘STATION MASTER’ sign on the door. Through the glass panel I could see the station master at his desk, stacks of folders neatly arranged in front of him, others in overhead racks. He looked up when I knocked, put his pen down and came to the door.
He was a pleasant-looking man in his mid-thirties, crisp white open-necked shirt with long sleeves buttoned up at the cuffs.
‘Good afternoon, my name’s Claudia Valentine.’ I told him I was a geography teacher researching a project on urban transport. Did he have any maps or diagrams of the station?
‘You’re keen,’ he remarked, ‘doing this during the holidays.’ He reached up to one of the racks and plucked out a large plastic folder. On the cover it said ‘ST JAMES STATION’. Just as he placed it on the desk his phone rang. ‘St James,’ he said, turning the folder round, inviting me to have a look. The folder was a bit like a school project itself. Everything neatly set out in plastic envelopes in the ring binder. Timetables, engineering specifications, statistics for commuters, tickets sold. And maps.
One map was of the station and the area surrounding it—Elizabeth Street, St James Church, Macquarie Street—dotted lines indicating the pathways of Hyde Park. It mapped the pedestrian tunnels from Elizabeth Street and St James Road and the below-ground fan rooms. It also gave the plan of the station, the turnstiles and the platforms below.
Another diagram was of the stations and tracks in the inner city, from Central to Circular Quay. It was comforting to see the complex maze of city tracks set out so simply. I noted with interest that at the Circular Quay end of St James station there was a tunnel that appeared to lead nowhere.
‘How are you going?’ Having finished his phone call, the station master was turning his attention back to me.
‘Fine. What’s this?’ I asked, pointing out the dead-end tunnel.
‘There’d be a few of them under the city. Built at the beginning of the century. It was probably going to be one of the tracks on the eastern suburbs line. They were thinking of it even back then. Only took them fifty years to get around to it, then they put it through Martin Place rather than St James.
‘Some people reckon General Macarthur had secret headquarters down there during the war but I’ve been down there, I don’t think so. There’s no evidence of it ever having been used. There’s a big pool of water at the end of it, that’s all.’
‘Easy to get into?’
‘It’s not accessible to the public, of course. But staff go down there.’
‘Regularly?’
‘When something needs doing. We have people doing maintenance work on the lines that are used, but it’d be years since anyone went down into that particular tunnel. No need.’
‘Thanks for showing me this,’ I said, ‘it’s been very helpful.’
‘No worries. Do you need to photocopy anything?’
‘Not at the moment. Thanks.’
Raf had spotted me, he’d be wary, alert. On the lookout. He may even have been watching me right now. He was going to lead me to Madalena but not today.