Memories of Jane Doe

She appeared in the paper seven times under the name Jane Doe. First the details of her body being found by the Maribyrnong River. Then details of the investigation. Speculation as to who she was. Appeals to the public for information. More speculation and no answers. A few brief mentions before she disappeared altogether. The last one was an article about crimes against women, on the rise, more brutal, increasingly unsolved, etc. etc. At that point she’d barely paused in her transition from an anecdote to a statistic.

Ron looked through every page of the newspaper. He forgot about the ink on his fingers and licked them as he turned the pages. Must have been doing it for minutes before he noticed. The black smear of news on his tongue. And he was a chef, for God’s sake. To say he’d been distracted lately didn’t even come close to it.

Ron put the paper onto a stack of other newspapers. Looked at those piles, some now as tall as his shoulder, leaning against the walls in his walk-in fridge, and still didn’t know what to do with them. They kept piling up. Filled with the controversy of a musician being discovered with paedophilic pictures on his computer. A celebrity divorce—Katie Sterling pictured with a black eye in the window of a taxi outside her hotel. Articles about a man stopping his vehicle on the West Gate Bridge to throw his four-year-old daughter into the water. A drop of 58 metres. Broken by the fall. Dead from drowning. The American presidency dominating all the papers, going on about it, every nuance, every day, in every newspaper, ceaselessly, repeating every detail, over and over again. And nothing more of his Jane Doe.

Ron walked to the bathroom and brushed his teeth. Washed his mouth out with Listerine to get the black ink smear off his tongue. He stuck it out in the mirror and saw nothing but the green of the mouthwash. His skin looked colourless. Pale because of all the hours in the kitchen and sleeping away the best parts of the day. Pale, and pink. The look of uncooked chicken. He brushed and rinsed again.

She didn’t know the word for rooster. Called him a male chicken when he woke her too early one day with a cock-a-doodle-doo. A joke as it was closer to noon that it was dawn. Roosters did not make that sound where she came from—it confused him since it had to be the same animal noise, didn’t it? Yet every language interpreted the sound differently, cocorico to kokekokko. She was confused and then amused by the call of cock-a-doodledo. Both of them laughing about it for days. Neither of them needing to know then that another phrase that differs in every tongue is Jane Doe.

He came home from work one day. It was as late as seven or eight in the morning. Found her in the bathroom, her head in the basin. Washing peroxide from her head. Her long brown hair in clumps all over the floor; and in his imagination, the walls, the ceiling, out in the hall and strewn across everything everywhere. Because it felt disastrous, even though she raised her head with a giggle that put a cleaver through his chest.

He pulled her away from the basin, and stared at her with her hacked hair, as if he’d caught her in the act of suicide.

Yelling at her. “What are you doing?”

She looked at him with that wide open smile of hers beginning to collapse. “I wanted to see what blonde felt like,” she whispered.

No way for him to explain to her what all that lustrous brown hair, smelling of bergamot, meant to him because he couldn’t explain it to himself. She put her small hand to his chest to calm him down.

“I was going to clean this all away, after,” in a heavy accent. “I never cause mess for you, do I?”

It was the day he knew something was wrong with him. Because he went to bed and he cried about it. Seeing her with short peroxide hair was part of it. All that bergamot hair hacked to the tiles—it was a suicide that only killed the parts of her he loved.

Isaac stopped at the back door of his house and had his lie ready before he went inside. It wasn’t a believable lie. There was no way he could hide the guitar from his parents but they didn’t ask him about it.

Isaac’s mother was on the phone in the kitchen, trying to whisper advice to Sharon, a friend of hers finding it difficult to be alone. There were years ahead of waiting out her husband’s incarceration. The husband had been drunk at the wheel one afternoon and ran down two schoolgirls, killing one of them and crippling the other. Whispering because Dad was in the lounge.

“Hi, Dad,” Isaac murmured as he passed through the lounge room.

Dad was in pain. Some days the pain was in his back, other days it was in his hips or knees. Getting bad enough that each hour at work was a misery. No way out and it was getting worse. A new doctor had recommended meditation, so Dad was in the lounge room, lying on his back on the bare floorboards with his eyes closed, looking like he’d been shot. The voice of a man called Cabot Zen on a CD was telling his father he was a lake. That no matter the splashes or ripples, changes of season, the lake was always itself. Its nature would not change. Across its surface, the lake reflected the world as it passed by overhead—each cloud, each storm—yet the lake was not made of reflections.

Isaac walked to his room and hid the guitar in his wardrobe. He sat on his bed thinking about the guitar for half an hour and then opened the wardrobe and brought the instrument out of its case. He had been playing guitar for almost a year. It was a cheap nylon string with a bowed neck that his father had bought at a garage sale down the road. The guitar he was looking at now was similar to the ones he’d seen in his guitar magazines. A Guild twelve-string. Dark satin-finish mahogany with a mother-of-pearl rosette and inlays. The guitar case alone told him it was a fine instrument—a crimson velvet interior that made him think of his mother’s jewellery boxes. This kind of guitar might be worth as much as his father’s car, so Isaac wouldn’t be able to pretend he’d bought it with pocket money. Or that anyone had lent it to him. That was the excuse he would have used if his mother had asked in the kitchen or his father in the lounge. Isaac had to come up with something better.

His parents wouldn’t think Isaac had stolen it, because where would he steal it from? He wouldn’t have been able to walk out of a music shop with a Guild. Doubtful the dudes behind the counter would let him even touch it. Isaac couldn’t have broken into someone’s house. Burglary wasn’t shoplifting a Kit Kat from the milk bar.

If he told them he’d found it on his way home from school they would be obliged to at least try to return the Guild to its owner. Because no-one forgets this kind of instrument in the gazebo at Catani Gardens. It wasn’t a wallet or a phone, to slip out of a pocket. Nor could it be dumped like a broken television or an old fridge. Clearly it was a perfect instrument.

It was clean—nothing but a few handling smudges. He wiped down the guitar with a soft cloth because he didn’t want to see the owner’s fingerprints. He wanted the guitar to already be his. It would still be in tune. He didn’t strum the strings to see if that was true because the noise might alert his parents. The steel strings, especially on a big twelve-string dreadnought, would sound entirely different from his usual guitar noise.

If it was damaged, it would be repaired. This was one of those things in the world that was never willingly destroyed or abandoned. So it was some kind of accident. Isaac hadn’t stolen it and there was nothing for him to feel guilty about. He just wanted to keep this accident. Why should only the bad kind of accident be permanent? Like what happened to the two schoolgirls because of Sharon’s alcoholic husband.

Isaac put the Guild back into its case and then found a better place for it on the top shelf of his wardrobe. He picked up his old nylon-string guitar and practised playing Saltarello as his mind went around in circles futilely searching for a way to explain this accident.

Her name was not discovered. Days went by. Nothing turned up. And it appeared nothing would. The coroner couldn’t determine the cause of death. Evidence of hypothermia, which was hard to make sense of, and nothing definitive. Occasionally it was impossible to get conclusive evidence of what had happened. We could guess and we could assume. There were questions and there were searches. There was speculation and there was imagination. But her name remained unknown. And days and days had gone by. Naked. Broken nails. Painted a light blue. Some defensive wounds. Rope burns. Callused fingertips only on her left hand, so a guitar player. Ring marks on her fingers, none indicating marriage. Not yet a mother. Dentals pointed to a European birth. She had not been raped. And still no name though days had passed on a metal table.

She started going out to raves and came home still dancing like she was insane with music that wouldn’t stop thumping through her head, and going on and on about nothing, speeding or exhausting the ecstasy that was smudging her eyes with that dark sleepless shade of static. The different men coming home with her, fucking her in her bedroom. All vivid, welts and bruises in his mind, as if they were filming pornos using his daughter.

Yet he was nothing to his Jane Doe. Simply a friendly man who decided to let her stay with him after working with her for three weeks. So that they could cook together and enjoy meals with good wine. She could play her guitar, and he could listen to her songs. Encourage her and occasionally clap. Never did he take advantage, even though he woke up with thoughts about her and went to sleep thinking about her. And he was only ever appropriate, when he could have devoured her he was so hungry for everything she was.

It was after a great meal that she told him. Tasmanian Atlantic salmon caught just the day before, on the couscous she’d never heard of before she met him, with the fresh lemons she loved so much. Rich, buttery chardonnay in tall, clear glasses on his balcony and looking out to the West Gate Bridge, the water going out to a thin blue horizon, and holiday life down on Fitzroy Street buzzing up to them as if the whole world was suddenly delighted. Everything filled in his heart, running reeling red and luscious thick—it was then that she told him she was leaving for Sydney.

Going to Sydney. With that smile. Her face already a golden colour from the early St Kilda summer. Golden like she was glowing with caramelised sun. Sydney. Going. Going. Gone … but for a puff of smoke. He could feel the words in his chest as though he’d swallowed the fish whole, and all the bones catching on his insides, and he couldn’t swallow and couldn’t move.

“You can’t go,” he told her. “Not like that. Just vanish.”

“How wonderful you make Melbourne for me.”

For her—as if he was a fucking ambassador to the city. He told her he wouldn’t let her go, and of course she giggled sweetly. Even her laughter was confectionary. He explained it carefully for his Jane Doe.

“I will not let you go.” He wanted to close his eyes but he couldn’t blink for a few moments. “I’ll never see you again.”

It took a while before she wasn’t laughing about it, and that quickly became a kind of fighting that threatened to become her leaving now, right out the door with her half-empty backpack and her guitar. He put his hands on her for the first time.

The struggle for her limbs became oily with things he’d never seen in himself before, rising with black mist in his brain, and spraying from his mouth until she was on the floor and she was bleeding. Not dead. Frightened when she looked at him and afraid to scream. But then finding her voice. So he had to make a gag. Her limbs flailed and fingernails broke. He had to tie her down. He took the locks off the inside of his walk-in fridge. Rigged it so it could only be opened from the outside.

The idea was to put her in there and take off the gag and the ropes so she could start to think. So that this craziness could pass. He drank the chardonnay and started on the Belvedere vodka she’d bought him as a going-away present. He wandered from room to room. Drank and sat on his balcony and gazed out to the blue horizon—the edge of a sharp kitchen blade just off the whet stone. He drank so he wouldn’t think about Sydney, and the brutal marks across her face and arms, and all of this ending so ugly when it began as something clean and good.

He couldn’t explain how he fell asleep for such a long time and how the dial on the fridge was turned to maximum. His intention had been to turn it to minimum and click it to off. That wasn’t what happened. His hand had turned in another direction.

In that last minute, before the car tumbled over, throwing the world around in a catastrophic spin of fragmenting glass and bits of plastic and crushing metal—even in the moment when the new Merc went over its right side, Cicely thought it wouldn’t happen. And as it was happening, that this would be something else. One of those things you could talk about with a thrilled whisper in the back of your throat. Even as her ribs broke under the steering wheel, and her right arm was all but cut from her body with the impact of a wooden telephone pole through the driver’s side door, she didn’t see it coming. Didn’t believe it was here. Not now. Already. She had a few more moments. If she’d been given a choice, before the pain obliterated her mind, she would have ticked the box that read ‘Immediate Painless Exit’. She was broken, a busted, bleeding body and barely saw anything outside raging agony. It might have been beautiful if not for the pain and fear. Bunches of flowers on her back seat, the impact sending them tumbling around her, like the inside of a snow globe. The flowers dancing floral rainbows about her eyes. A carnation falling to cover her right eye in pink. It could have been beautiful. And it should have been. Earlier still, there was Veuve Clicquot and tears, even from Ron, for the three chef hats in The Age Good Food Guide. Waiters, for whom it was a way to earn a wage and get good tips, couldn’t understand what Cicely and Ron felt that night, when everything went fairytale, like the cosmos itself was whispering pearl music in their ears—you are loved by the stars, you are loved by destiny—calling them by their very names. The fire from the ruptured fuel tank blew, not with a Hollywood explosion of dynamite, but a pop and whoosh, and the calm flow of petrol spread around her and the clean-smelling leather seats of her first new car, with a gentle fire at first, which hurt far less than the shards of rib piercing her lungs, building to a crescendo. It made her use her last breath for something not quite a scream, and barely a moan. And if at the ticking of the boxes beforehand there had been a choice for cause of death, she would have laughed at this one option that did her in. It was almost funny. Almost beautiful. But it wasn’t a box. This was what happened: a duck, with a line of trailing ducklings behind, crossing the road just beyond the West Gate Bridge. She would have mowed the motherfucking things down if she’d been given that box to tick. Some kind of instinct made her swing the wheel to the right and then left to correct. Overdoing it; not used to the new car. The champagne didn’t help. The euphoria of three chef hats in The Age Good Food Guide. That’s what it was … probably. And that whispering pearl star music.

Ron finished brushing and washing his mouth out. Nodded at the reflection in the mirror. Nodded at it again and again, saying yes. And yes again. And OK. Yes.

He moved to the silver walk-in fridge he had specially built and fitted in his designer kitchen and turned the dial to full. Already so cold it hurt when he stepped inside. He reached around the outside of the door and swung it shut behind him. The handle and lock were still removed from the inside.

Naked and pale. Sucking in the crystallising air. He lay down on the newspapers. Wanted to become a slab of meat. Breathed out shorter puffs of white. A clean taste in his mouth now.

The black hours of no moon and an empty sky. The last trams outside rang in the hollow streets from the Esplanade and Fitzroy Street—the soft sound of their metal wheels across the smooth rails and the sharp electric crackling of the power they drew from the overhead lines. I wandered around Ron’s apartment, a ghost that night. Thinking about how lost I felt. Turning on the television and seeing news about cricket, a game that made me feel home was so far away it might as well have been Shangrila. Turning it off again.

A man was crossing a wire strung between two towers in New York in a flyer on the coffee table. I’d brought the flyer home from the cinema after we watched a documentary about a high-wire walker from France. In the film the man also crossed a wire on Sydney Harbour Bridge. I found myself thinking, yes, Sydney, and yes, why not now. The French high-wire walker moved so easily from France to Australia to New York—no reason I couldn’t flit over to Sydney. I’d never planned on staying in Melbourne so long. Welcoming and offering belonging. I’d earn some travelling money busking at Southern Cross Station and sneak on a train going to Sydney. If they caught me I had enough for a fare but maybe they wouldn’t catch me.

The last trams had long since left the streets outside Ron’s apartment for the evening and I still couldn’t sleep. The silence made my ears ring. I watched the clock tick over until my head was filled with red digital numerals multiplying and subtracting. In the snatch of sleep I got that night I dreamed my head was the top part of an hourglass and my body the other half, and through my throat went the red hot coals of digital numbers from a clock radio. I woke up choking and needing three glasses of water. I packed my backpack and placed it by the front door with my guitar in its case. Was ready to go. It was black outside and I didn’t want to leave Ron with nothing but a note and a bottle of Belvedere. So I wandered around his apartment again. Endlessly moving around, like I was searching for something. He was gone so often I felt I was suffocating in his spotlessly clean, stainless-steel, air-tight apartment. At the restaurant again. When he came home, it would be well after dawn sometimes, and then he’d sleep until four or five in the afternoon, and soon he’d go off again.

I watched the sky change. Light creased the world at its purple-blue edges. I couldn’t get the idea of Sydney out of my mind. I wanted to see the harbour. I wanted to cross it in a ferry. I wanted to play music on the steps of the Opera House. I walked around his house, and then I went looking for an indigo shirt I knew Ron owned. I didn’t have any blue clothes in my backpack. It amazed me how strong and clear that desire for indigo felt that morning.

On Ron’s wide open Esplanade balcony, looking out across St Kilda Marina and all its forever-furled masts, the West Gate Bridge, and the city of Melbourne and its endless searching gaze across the sea.

I sat a while and composed a song, overlooking the careening, flashing morning trams, sounding like dodgem cars at local fairs back in Serbia. Feeling homesick for it, and the wild trumpet music of those fairs as well, which drew up a wild bliss—which forced you out of your seat and compelled your hands up and reaching into the air for it, screams of joy cutting through your heart, the deafening whistling from the men all around, calling it to them, to their women, to their children, and for the world to know, God will dance over the summer grass here with barefoot joy, amid the hopping, stamping, skipping feet of the bliss-abandoned dancers. Everywhere else it appeared in the world it was something tamer, and as I sat there, that homesickness swelled my heart with a longing I knew was the lie of distance.

I was surprised to feel it cured moment to moment, by the vast opening blue skies of Australia, the brightest, crystal-clear skies I could have ever dreamed of. “The Cure of Australian Light” is what I called that song. Ron trudged up from around the Esplanade in his filthy chef’s gear. He noticed me up on his balcony and waved. A smile on his face as he saw me wearing his blue shirt. For a moment it felt we shared a life in that apartment but I hadn’t put the shirt on because of Ron. It was because I wanted to feel the indigo of Sydney’s harbour and Melbourne’s skies as though I were already flying from one to the other.

Ron wasn’t generous. Even he wouldn’t have said that about himself. There was nothing generous about the world either. And if that was true, then generosity was just another kind of weakness.

There was a story he’d heard years ago about battery hens. Crazed as they were with their compressed lives, occasionally one of them would be cut and a spot of red would appear in its white feathers. The other battery hens would begin attacking that red spot, killing the injured bird. In the frenzied attack another chicken would receive a red spot and the frenzy would go on until all the birds were dead. Or as good as dead. Generosity was that kind of red spot in the compression he felt all around him. Sometimes someone good could bring out the best in a person.

Ron felt that was true about the Serbian girl he drove to the city from the airport. He let her change the radio station to whatever she wanted. Changing songs he enjoyed midway. She leaned towards the radio as if it was vital she find the perfect song. Lighting harsh French cigarettes even though it made him cough. He felt an expansive generosity. It’s OK, he said. It’s OK. It felt unusual—a benediction for himself as much as for her. The Eastern European accent made him think of burning villages and barefoot winter poverty.

She wasn’t the kind of pretty to make a man act crazy. So it wasn’t that, but she had beautiful hair, a lovely smile, and a laugh that made him feel good. As though he’d been laughing as well. Couldn’t help grinning at her when she slapped the dashboard, saying finally, finally, because a singer she called Jason Mraz was playing a song called ‘I’m Yours’. Singing out the window at the top of her lungs and flicking away her cigarette when they crossed the West Gate Bridge. She seemed to deserve a little generosity. His Jane Doe accepted it easily and didn’t detect any red spots on him. He wasn’t living a battery life after all.

Ice was in the corners of the windows. Lazy snow drifted down, and up again, in flurries. The black marks of skeletal trees made the Belgrade winter sky look like it was cracking open. But that was through double-glazed glass. And we’d cranked up the central heating to full and let it continue to blow the warm air around us past spring and into the height of a thermostat summer. I lay on the clean sheets he put down before I came over. I breathed the aroma of bergamot oil his mother used in her washing, fresh off the fabric. He was sleeping so deeply in that moment that I could rustle up a pen from my schoolbag, draw a heart across the left side of his chest, and write Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence in red ink inside it, because we’d been listening to that one song all day. It was just a shame I couldn’t have tattooed that red ink into his chest. I knew this wasn’t going to last forever, even in the most persuasive transports of our love. The trinkets we could afford for each other would fall into drawers and tumble further into the back of wardrobes and then roll into basement boxes, never to be looked at again. I still wondered about permanence. About what stayed in us while everything else kept washing us out clean with bergamot perfume. My face in his pillow on that winter’s afternoon while his parents were away. Through the crisp white linen that still caught the delicious scent of this one person, this one man, this one boy, this one bit of love. Both of us naked and that being odd enough that it was thrilling. I would pull the sheet across myself and he’d tug it away and revel in simply looking at me. His eyes full of me. His head full of me. His heart and soul too … only for now. Soon he would wake and we’d have to give all of it up and surrender to the cracked sky out there beyond the skeletal trees and heat-frosted glass. When he woke, we kissed. Kissed long, like love lived in this shared breath of lips, like it might last forever, or as forever as lips could sustain. My love for this boy would fade, and his name would mean less, like the love that lasted this one winter, but it was the long, long kiss that was the heart he drew through my chest. The taste of forever, sweeter for every moment it dwelled and breathed red lies. That’s the way I thought back then as I drew on his chest with a red biro from my schoolbag.

Cicely drove in with another speeding ticket, to have breakfast in the closed restaurant. Her staff went about cleaning cutlery, polishing glasses, preparing their stations. She didn’t change what she had for breakfast. Great coffee. Great bread. A homemade plum jam. Occasionally quince. Ron introduced a marmalade recently which he made himself. And the paper spread out before her. She could do all this at home but Cicely loved being surrounded by tables, with chairs placed upside down on them, and to then feel them all being removed quietly, and positioned below the tables. To feel her staff around her, in impeccable white shirts and immaculate black pants or skirts, cleaning down the tables with soapy cloths in the graceful arcing movements of their arms. To feel the building preparation. Everything becoming ready as she looked over her paper. So quiet she could hear each page falling open. Later, there would be the sound of a busy restaurant in full swing, and for hours there would be in all that noise, the threat of chaos. Even a broken plate could create a silence that rushed at her with the possibility of disaster.

She was not to be interrupted during her breakfast. Not for phone calls. Not for apparent emergencies. Until she finished her paper she’d receive her floor manager or her chef, and even they would have to have a good reason.

Ron walked to her table. Hesitation in his face despite the casual stroll from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a tea towel that was already filthy. A pastry chef he’d had to fire summarily would need to be replaced. He found her sitting oddly still. Her cigarette in the ashtray, with two centimetres of unknocked ash. Looking down at the paper, fixated.

He stopped by the edge of the table and saw what she was looking at so intently. Not reading. Staring at a picture. Jane Doe printed below it, as though that was her name. The newspaper asking for any information. Both of them looked at the picture until she lifted her head and stared at him. Her fierce eyes cutting through his face.

“Did you know about this?”

“Yes,” he said in a small voice. “I did.” He’d practised a response but in the vital moment was overwhelmed.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Her voice sliced through the parts of his brain desperately searching for a response, finding nothing in himself other than the need to hide.

“She was living with you, wasn’t she?” asked Cicely.

“Yes, I had the spare room. Never been used in the years I’ve been in that place.” All of that empty space, and how she’d filled every part of it, became clear in his mind in that moment. He was ready to admit he had killed the girl. He was only waiting for Cicely to ask the inevitable question. He was ready to nod and accept everything that might be brought down upon him. He wanted the judgement. He understood he deserved any and all punishment that might be given him for ending the life of a traveller moving through the world, playing music and smiling easily.

“That type of girl lives dangerously, doesn’t she?” asked Cicely, and then answered her own question. “Girls like that go out into the woods and think all the wolves will be puppy dogs, because her smile is sweet and she can sing for them. And we both know she was only going deeper and deeper into those woods. There was no protecting her from her own fairytale.”

Feeling lobotomised, he nodded. “She left for Sydney. Had some guy up there promise her a recording deal. Because of a demo tape, or, I don’t know ... but she left me with a mess.” That was one of the lies he had practised.

Cicely continued to cut at him with her eyes as though she wasn’t doing anything more than criticising a point on the menu. Ron felt he needed to keep talking now he’d started. He began another rehearsed response, not realising one lie would negate the other.

“She liked to busk around Degraves Street in the city or sometimes even those empty alleys—because the acoustics were good, she said. And maybe it was a bad lift she got,” Ron suggested. “Because you know she liked to hitchhike. That’s how I met her, for God’s sake!”

Cicely finally returned his nod yet accepted neither of Ron’s scenarios, continuing with her own line of thought. “Fairytales only end well in cartoons. In the real world there’s no saving a girl lost in a fairytale.” She blinked. And blinked again. My chef and my restaurant, she thought. She saw newspapers and camera lenses. Blinked and blinked. Each time clearing the disaster from her mind as she would have the calamity of a waiter dropping a tray of drinks onto an A-list guest the night before. Of course it was impossible. And if not impossible—because Ron had proven himself volatile in the past—there was no reason for her to know anything about the girl after she left Cicely’s employment. She’d had hundreds of waitresses come and go.

“You must be shattered,” she suggested.

He was finally able to look away. Let a breath sag the paunch under his apron. “She lived with me a month. I don’t know if I can talk about it. She was a beautiful girl.”

“Don’t talk about it. You don’t need to talk about it. We’re fully booked tonight. And busy is good. You just keep it together. This kind of thing is never easy.”

He walked away, not having told her about the fired pastry chef.

Cicely folded the newspaper. Noticed her cigarette had burned out. She lit up another one. Threw the newspaper in the bin as she went around the bar to talk to her barman about the new cocktail menu. For the next month she did not buy a newspaper to read while she had her coffee and toast in the mornings.

There was something about people passing by that created a space in my mind I loved to fill with songs. I had to soak up minute after minute and accumulate hours of them to really feel it fully dilate. For the air to get thicker and be revealed as gas and the bodies and voices to blur and smudge through me with the oil of passing life. I would play while I waited, and then, when my soul was open, all of these people moving along Degraves Street could flow through me.

One day I saw a man drinking a latte and eating an almond biscotti. He had a crack through one lens of his glasses but he didn’t appear to notice. He checked his watch every few minutes. His head filled with thoughts that couldn’t find a way out. After he finished his coffee and biscuit he sat and went on thinking. They cleared his table and when he remembered to check his watch again he got up and left quickly.

Maybe the crack through his glasses didn’t bother him but I had an image of broken eyes. Glass eyes fractured throughout. I had this idea that it was possible to look at the world through broken eyes and see everything fractured and exploding in a billion flying pieces— pooling in our minds because all of us were the broken pieces of a larger thing, a soul that formed during an ice age that lasted a hundred generations, now starting to melt in us. Leaving shards to float through the blood. Music brought warmth into the body. That’s what it always did for me. I sang:

“Tell me babe, do you know

it’s not enough to crawl

not enough, my dear, to fall

from your cradle with a wave

slip soft down into your grave

you’re meant to find the chance

to hear the sun sing while you dance.

Dance, babe, let’s dance, let’s dance.”

In the end, I let all the lyrics go and went into the music wordlessly, playing with my eyes closed, as long as my hands would let me. Opening my eyes to find ten people had stopped to listen. A little boy had his eyes closed too. His mother gave him some coins to throw into my open guitar case. I called that song “The Broken Ice of a Melting Soul”. I wrote down the chords. I couldn’t find that song again anyway. Some of them just come and then they go, no matter how hard you try to remember.

Ron loved telling people about how he was headhunted. He told it like Cicely Browne had come all the way to London for him alone. If he was talking to men, kitchen hands or another chef, then he’d add that for an arse as sweet as Miss Browne’s, he would gladly fly across any ocean, endure all manner of hardship, even come to the colonies. And he loved calling Australia that. If there were women around, he’d tell them in minute detail about the meal he cooked for her the night she was spellbound. Cicely never denied being entranced. If asked, she would close her eyes in a brief moment of relived rapture.

“That beast is fucking magic in the kitchen,” she’d say to anyone who cared to listen. “A culinary revolutionary.” She would have liked to put that into the advertising; had sense enough to allow his reputation to grow through the meals he produced. Words might be bullshit but the brute fact of his talent was indisputable when people sat down to eat at Arcady Blue.

The part of the story Ron rarely told was how Cicely had waited for him in the alley behind the Notting Hill restaurant to explain to him with ardent enthusiasm how she would take Ron to another country so that she could make him a rightful king of knives and fire. It was that expression that had caught his imagination. Or perhaps it was a knight of knives and fire, he told his Jane Doe one night as they walked the St Kilda boardwalk back to his place. Not mentioning he’d had a moment of awful behaviour months before in London and that he needed a new city to start again.

Cicely liked the Serbian girl. Knew that customers responded warmly to her as well. The tips came in heavy, more than doubling the wages Cicely paid her. She was pretty enough but there were prettier just passing the windows. No, she made everything seem easy. She sang songs under her breath while she carried four fully loaded main course plates right across the wide restaurant from the kitchen. Had a loud sincere laugh that made a regular dinner feel celebratory. She could dance between customers with a tray of cocktails at midnight when the rest of Cicely’s staff were reduced to end-of-shift staggering.

And then one night the girl told Cicely that she would be finishing. Not in a week or two. That day! Cicely’s first reaction was hostile. She wanted to slap her face hard, with the meat of her hand, to watch her nose bleed. Cicely did that once to another girl that worked for her who wouldn’t stop crying over some silly boyfriend, dropping tears silently on business suit shoulders like raindrops. Fired her afterwards.

She didn’t want to give this girl the satisfaction. To know it felt like a real loss. Cicely didn’t say you can’t up and quit—no notice. With a damn smile on your face. As if I’m supposed to be some kind of fairy godmother, here to wave my wand so you can float along your merry fucking way to your next bullshit adventure.

So Cicely returned to her reservation list without blinking. From the side of her mouth she told the wog to leave her locker key, restaurant apron, even her name badge before leaving. Told her to finish up straight away rather than at the end of the evening. Explained to her staff that she’d fired the bitch for using.

Cicely didn’t read the words on the page before her for a few minutes, and wondered about her own desperation. Why did the Serbian girl leaving feel like a blow? As though she had been given a nosebleed slap herself. Cicely pinched the skin at her own hip, hard, to get herself to focus. She didn’t let go of the pinch for a few moments. Murmuring everyone’s replaceable, she got back down to the work at hand.

I pulled my guitar out as soon as I picked it up from the checked luggage and played a few popular tunes like “Space Oddity” and “Fast Car”. I played a few of my own songs and finished with “Atlantic City” and “Free Fallin’”. Had twenty dollars in Australian coins in my hat in half an hour—people seemed generous here. Airports aren’t easy for busking. A man, just back from a holiday on the French Riviera, stood there a while, enjoying my songs over the crowd pleasers. He offered to drive me to the city. Said his name was Ron. I’ll take you to the city, he said. I might even get you a job. I said yes, despite a few drops of airline red wine on his white T-shirt. He didn’t look too drunk to drive and his eyes became clearer as he blinked and waited for me to finish another two songs.

Cicely drove home as the sun was coming up. Exhausted all the way through. Singing between yawning and laughing. She could have opened her window to sing for the new sun as it began to rise—the night had gone that well. She flattered herself that she could use the word triumph.

Her restaurant was in St Kilda but she lived across the West Gate in Yarraville. A bit of a drive during rush hour; quick enough this time of day. After she crossed the bridge all her elation flew away from her somehow and a bitterness rose in her mouth that wouldn’t go away. It got worse until she was forced to stop her car. To get out and vomit.

Between the heaves she felt annoyed at her body, at her stomach, at the happy music pouring from her old Corolla, at the car itself, which was third-hand when she bought it and now looked multiplied by thirty hands more. She stood up and wiped the back of her wrist across her mouth, trembling right through her body.

At Cicely Browne’s feet were the remains of the food and wine from the grand reopening of her restaurant Arcady Blue. Completely refurbished and a new menu put together by one of the world’s most accomplished chefs. A man she’d headhunted from a three-star Michelinrated London restaurant to come and cook for her down in Melbourne. All of it, her triumph, the culmination of over twenty fucking years of clawing-desperate ambition and white-knuckle dreams.

The cars passed with a constant shoosh-shoosh. There was not much else around her. The most desolate place in the world was a stretch of roadside a little off the West Gate Bridge. And she was stuck there as she leaned over again and got down to ribbons of acid.

Cars continued to pass by, shoosh-shoosh. Moving along like an endless metal river that was gathering a current. Shoosh-shoosh-shoosh. Such a relentless noise. The sound of a river in which drowning was not just guaranteed, it was instantaneous. You’d be gone before you knew it.

The water moved past her, swinging her right leg out and back, her right arm, waving to and fro. But the rigor crept in and it was only her hacked short hair, peroxide blonde, that moved across the surface of the running river by the time evening fell. New light found her lying there—a nameless body. Face up and eyes open. Flesh the colour of concrete and the cold touch of fish scales. Caught on a riverbank, out by the long Maribyrnong. A trickle of mud ran from her mouth, open the space of a smile.

Isaac took the guitar out of the wardrobe and walked down to the gazebo in the Catani Gardens, where he found it. He had seen people play music there before and he knew the owner of the guitar might show up and ask for her guitar back. He was afraid that might happen. It also made him feel less guilty.

Isaac played in the gazebo every day after school, before Mum and Dad came home from work. He was getting better. He could sing and play at the same time now, which wasn’t easy. Putting down a few lyrics. Almost had a song. If she didn’t show up soon, if he had a few more days to practise, he might be able to play Nina one of her songs.

She hadn’t written down any lyrics for her songs. She’d sketched out chord changes and picking patterns. It wasn’t easy to fingerpick a twelve-string but Isaac was trying. He will tell Nina he was sorry he took her guitar from the gazebo if she showed up—the pretty girl in the four black-and-white photo-booth pictures. Isaac liked the one best where she took a section of her long hair to give herself a long moustache. Because then there was the photo after it, where Nina looked silly and sweet, laughing at her own joke.

Maybe that was her name. Isaac wasn’t sure. In the guitar case there was an unsent postcard with a picture of the West Gate Bridge with no stamp. No message yet either. She had started by saying Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. Isaac wasn’t sure why she didn’t buy a Christmas card instead of a postcard. Possibly a spur of the moment thing. At the end of the postcard to Mr Lawrence there were a few playful music notes and hearts in red ink and the name Nina Krunić.