11

‘So, unlike John Donne’s children, who were merely not formally recognised by their maternal grandfather for several years until he got over his annoyance at his daughter marrying a recusant Papist,’ I mutter as Simon and I exit the police complex, ‘I am actually illegitimate, from several new standpoints.’

‘You’re taking it surprisingly well,’ Simon murmurs as he scrolls through a text that has just come in on his phone. It’s long and rambling, and I watch something in his face sharpen. ‘It’s from Mum,’ he says suddenly, shoving the phone into a back pocket of his jeans. ‘She needs help. I have to go. You’ll be right to get home?’

Then he’s gone, taking two lanes against the lights in his long stride before I can even draw breath to reply. I don’t even make it to the pedestrian crossing on the corner before he is back in his car-slash-mobile-home and already three-quarters of his way through a U-turn.

I watch him roar up St Kilda Road, back towards the city—in the exact direction I want to go, the bastard. ‘No,’ I say aloud to myself at the deserted tram stop. ‘Actually, you’re the bastard. A proper one. Get used to it.’

I board the next tram, still cradling my home phone against my chest like it’s a pet that startles easily. The tram is crowded with interstate footy fans, irritated locals and tourists. I end up strap-hanging over this thin woman with sleek hair in gradated shades of brown, cut short in a kind of gravity-defying, rich art-dealer kind of bob. She glances down, annoyed, as our feet tangle together, toes touching. The woman is dressed in a sleek scarlet suit and black, open-toed stilettos with red soles, and her mouth is surrounded by those vertical lines you get from too much lip pursing and cigarettes.

My pack is crouched on my back like a giant carbuncle, and I wish to God I’d put the answering machine away before I got on, the plastic now slick in my one-handed grip. The tram sways back up the road towards the city, more people getting on than getting off, and it’s close inside, stuffy, smelling of wool and polyester and unwashed people. As I scan all the faces, I wonder if he could be one of them—Erik Nielsen, Mum’s husband, shit—and whether I’ve ever passed him on the street, looked him in the eye, and not known. Without warning, the bobbed woman stands and spears me in the foot with one of her stiletto heels. It’s jammed down squarely between my flesh and the side of my runner as she swings a designer leather tote off the floor.

‘Owwwwwww,’ I howl, because it bloody hurts.

Her heel is still inside my shoe, grinding down on the edge of my left foot as she snarls, ‘Well, move then,’ and my eyes fill with tears at her unkindness, at all the random unkindnesses of strangers.

Mum wasn’t called a chink-lover in Dimboola, I realise suddenly. Dimboola was just a story—no, a cypher—she used to illustrate a point. It must have happened here, when she was out walking with Dad, in the city where I was born. Maybe it was this woman, or someone just like her, who ground her forefinger into my pregnant mother’s breastbone and made her want to leave, starting the chain of everything that has led right back to now.

For a heartbeat, the woman and I seem suspended in time. She isn’t even looking at me, face averted in distaste, although the entire packed tram seems to be staring at us, waiting to see what I’ll do, the two of us standing in the middle of a giant, sucked-in breath of anticipation. Then time restarts the moment the woman rips her high heel out of my shoe and shoves her way forward, through the sea of eyes and faces.

She’s going to get away with it, I realise. And I know I will return to this moment again and again for the rest of my life, with regret and anger and sorrow; this moment where I did nothing, and said nothing, and was made nothing because of it.

My home phone drops out of my hands onto the floor with a hard thunk and before I’ve thought it through, I’m lunging forward, reaching out and grabbing the woman by her narrow shoulders, fingers digging hard into the slim shoulder pads of her suit jacket. I spin her around, so that she will see me. And her bright red lips fall open, eyes widening fearfully, when she catches sight of my face; my flaming, melted skin.

In the packed tram, people have cleared the space around us as if by magic, and I’m bawling at the top of my lungs, ‘I. AM. NOT. MY. MOTHER.’ Only, by the time I get to the word mother, I’m actually roaring like a lion, the word just devolving into this long scream of sound, and the woman jerks out of my grasp, stumbling to get away from me. The tram doors are only half-open, but she’s leapt right off the step. I watch her running on the tips of her ridiculous heels through the crowd waiting to get on and realise that the forcefield between me and the rest of the world is up, it’s on, because all I see are shocked faces turned my way, bodies leaning sideways to avoid me touching them.

I pick my telephone up off the floor, and walk slowly towards the exit and it’s like I’m the filthy, crazy, muttering person on the tram that no one wants to be near. I might as well be stinking of urine and raving about Armageddon, the way everyone’s looking at me. But you know what? I did something. I reacted. If time is a concertina, then I will never return to this memory with a feeling of shame.

Embarrassment, maybe. But not shame.

As I get off the tram a block past the Three Kings’ Bakehouse, I think I hear someone applauding. Or maybe it’s just my heart, beating, steady as a drum.

I’ve almost reached the Little Bourke Street exit to the arcade opposite my building when something strange happens. A man leaning against the wall beside the TattsLotto shop gives a start as I pass by, and then speed-dials a number on his mobile. It’s not my imagination; the two things are connected, Action A leading to Action B. When I look back, his eyes drop down to a little black notebook he’s holding in his other hand, but I swear I hear him mutter my name.

Mum named me after a famous Persian astronomer from the 11th century: No Bevs or Joyces for my girl, she would say grimly when I complained about someone giving me stick again, at my latest school. No one ever says Avicenna, just in passing. It’s not a place, it’s not a thing, and it’s got four syllables. So I notice, when it happens.

The guy’s tall and gaunt and weather-beaten with short, iron-grey hair slicked close to his skull. He’s decked out in fancy lace-up black brogues and tan slacks, and a collared shirt worn under a heavy blue jumper. Doesn’t look or smell homeless; never seen him before in my life.

I take it all in in a millisecond, picking up speed, almost tripping over the power cord to the answering machine as I make it out into Chinatown. I’ve exhausted my confrontation quotient for the day. Hell, I’ve exhausted my talking-to-strange-old-guys quotient for the day.

I look back over my shoulder and the man looks away, still talking about me, I just know it.

I’m so close.

The Mei Hua Bean Sprout Company sign is winking at me from across the road in the brilliant sunlight. Somehow it turned into a beautiful day. I’m only twenty metres from my door but instead of crossing over, the way I want to, I go right. Continue up the hill from my place, towards the two-storey Yum Cha palace with the bright-red pagoda façade at the front, intending to go around the block and come back from a different direction, just in case.

Because, as Mum used to say grimly: People possessed with ovaries can never be too careful, pet.

‘Hey!’ someone calls out from behind me. ‘You, there. Girl. Stop!’

I just walk faster, darting a quick look backwards as the lights change on the corner. Behind me, the front passenger door is starting to open on an early-model Mercedes the size of a boat: royal blue, well preserved, car wax gleaming in the sun. Can’t tell who’s coming out. Male? Female? I feel my adrenaline spike and keep rising.

As I’m looking back, the man from the arcade runs out into the street, throwing a hand up in the air. He starts hurrying up the footpath behind me, eyes intent, dodging pedestrians and couriers pushing trolleys stacked with boxes of bottled spirits. I’m jogging now, begging people to get out of my way under my breath. The man starts jogging, too. I’m almost running crab-ways up the street trying to see how much distance we’ve got between us when I see him cross Russell Street against the lights at a full run, long legs pumping, horns blaring. He’s closing the gap.

Everything’s moving: breath sobbing in and out of my body, pack bumping from side to side against my shoulder-blades, boobs, pot belly, all jiggling around under all the sweaty layers. I trip repeatedly over the telephone cord, getting it caught between my knees and around my legs, but it doesn’t stop me taking the Exhibition Street crossing at a full run, too, until I barrel into someone standing on the other side.

The man rocks backwards, then grips me by the upper arms. I’m beating at his chest with the telephone, while at the same time trying to twist out of his grasp. The sun’s in my eyes as the man growls, ‘Avicenna! Avi-cen-na!’ He’s really shaking me now. ‘Pull yourself together.’

All I can make are animal noises of distress. ‘It’s Boon, Boon,’ he adds, voice sharp with concern. ‘What’s wrong with you, girl?’

I focus on him with difficulty. ‘Le-me-go, le-me-go,’ I finally wheeze out in terror, still trying to pull away. I’ve got kilograms and inches on Boon, but he is as immovable as a tree. ‘There’s a man,’ I blurt, ‘following me and I don’t know why. I have to go.’

Boon looks over my shoulder and his expression shifts. Before I understand what’s happening, he has propelled me down a narrow cobblestone alleyway and into… a commercial kitchen.

‘Dai Gor,’ someone yells out in surprise as Boon and I skid across the slick tiled floor. All around are clouds of steam rising from pans and woks that smell of braised meats; stainless-steel bowls filled with yellow noodles, glassy vermicelli, mounds of cut, pre-washed green vegetables. Men in cook’s whites and check pants that have gone dingy from repeat washing look up in surprise as we pass by. Over the sound of running water and sizzling woks, Boon continually calls out in greeting, but we’re through to another alleyway at the back of the restaurant before I can draw breath.

Here it is quiet, reeking of rotting food and beer; exhaust fumes from the commercial car park that runs alongside it. There’s no one in sight, but Boon keeps going, taking us in through the back screen door of another old building off the alley on the opposite side. The kitchen we’re in now is dimly lit, and at first I think there’s no one in here until I spot, through a bank of steel shelving, the burly figure of a bald old man in rolled-up blue shirtsleeves and jeans consulting a wall chart.

Boon takes us up the central kitchen walkway, island benches on either side, calling out confidently, ‘Newlands! My apologies. Just passing through, my friend.’

This place smells like baked-on, caked-on apricot chicken and meatloaf, goulash, hash browns and boiled vegetables with an overlay of hospital-strength disinfectant. It smells like The Caf at school. Newlands turns his head in angry surprise until he sees who it is and comes forward to shake Boon’s hand. He eyes me interestedly. ‘Of course, and you’ll have good reason,’ he says calmly.

‘There’s a man following my goddaughter,’ Boon replies with an ease that, for a second, makes me wish it were for real. To be someone’s daughter again. Newlands’ expression sharpens under his bushy white eyebrows.

Boon adds, ‘This is Greyson’s child.’

Newlands’ face brightens, then falls immediately, like the two old men have discussed my father’s sad demise many times over cups of coffee.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ is Newlands’ simple response. He squeezes my free hand in greeting, or sympathy. ‘What would you like for me to do, Boon?’

Boon shakes his head. ‘She can wait at the museum while I check our building. Nothing for you to do, old friend. As I said, just passing through.’

‘Offer stands,’ Newlands responds mildly, leading us out of the quiet kitchen and into a suffocatingly dark space on the other side of it. He puts one of his hands under my elbow in a way that isn’t creepy, just solicitous, like he’s known me forever.

In the darkness, linked between the two old men, I feel the consistency of the floor suddenly change beneath my feet: from the dull feel of burnished concrete, to the warped and pitted wood of old floorboards. Our footsteps have a hollow echo now, as if the space has grown cavernous, and I ask, suspicious, ‘What is this place?’

Newlands suddenly stops. The wood-floored room we are standing in is bounded on the far side by what appears to be a heavy curtain, a thin chink of pale daylight coming through it. My eyes are beginning to adjust. On the far side of the space, in the corner by the back wall, is a faint glow, too. Subterranean. Maybe stairs.

Newlands lets go of my arm and I sway momentarily in the darkness. I hear him tripping and cursing, feeling about on the wall. Then he flicks up some kind of metal lever and the narrow band of light through the curtain grows bright, dazzling, artificial.

Newlands moves forward to tug one edge of the velvet curtain open, and I see old-style footlights, like glowing white teeth, outlining the edge of a stage. Behind me is a faded theatre set made up of trees and swings, a hint of bucolic lawn, protruding out a little way from the wings on either side. We emerge onto the lip of the stage, blinking, as if we have just emerged from a fairytale wood.

Before me, the shadowed room rises up steeply in tiers of fixed bench seats and tables; it’s shaped like a small amphitheatre. Everything is painted black, and the huge crystal chandelier in the ceiling looms unlit; so high off the ground that it hurts me to look up at it.

‘Oldest operational theatre restaurant in Melbourne,’ Newlands says proudly, helping me down off the side of the stage. ‘Featuring one of the few surviving star traps in Australia.’

Newlands points up at an octagonal shape set into the floor at centre stage. We’re standing at eye level to the thing, which has eight separate hinges, one for each section of the asterisk that bisects the octagon. I imagine the lines breaking up, springing open like a vicious, toothed flower made of wood, disgorging tomfoolery and hijinks from below.

‘It was a hit when we did a run of vampire shows in the 70s; people couldn’t get enough of it. Dry ice, flames, you name it, and suddenly the baddie’s right there, amongst it. How’d he get there? Everyone screaming their heads off. It was a sensation. But we don’t use it now because the mechanism jams and there’s no surprise in it these days. The last person who shot up out of “Hell” to terrorise the living had a nasty shock.’ The old man’s eyes go distant and opaque. ‘Nearly broke us.’

We follow Newlands up a steep set of stairs at the left of the auditorium towards street level, passing a deserted bar and ticket booth. He pauses with us by the front door, just inside the scuffed-looking foyer that still smells of the cigarettes of yesteryear.

‘I’m here every day, except Mondays, till late, just remember,’ Newlands tells me, his voice grave, his fingers still curled beneath my elbow. ‘Family have wanted me retired for years, but retired is another word for dead in my book.’

He lets go of me then, and pulls open the heavily carved wooden front door, holding it slightly ajar. ‘Perverts all over these days,’ he says, swinging the door wider and nudging us out onto the threshold. ‘Can’t be too careful, lovey.’

There are faded black-and-white theatre shots plastered to the windows on either side of the entrance—people in feather boas and lederhosen and crazy headgear, exaggerated face paint—and a colony of dead flies lying around on the sills underneath with curled-up legs and dull wings. Newlands urges, ‘Ask for Uncle Des, understand? Always welcome. Greyson was like a son to me.’ His voice is sombre. ‘Watched him grow up around the place.’

Then he shuts the heavy door in our faces.

With a sweeping gaze that takes in the Sichuan noodle house and sushi train joint on either side, the entrance to the commercial car park just beyond them and the down-at-heel hotel across the road, Boon turns us left and walks briskly past a bottle shop, a mini-mart and a travel agent before we cross towards a faded building on the corner that proclaims itself Her Majesty’s Theatre. We cut back into the top end of Little Bourke Street, still blocks away from home. Boon steers me under a ceremonial stone gateway, between a matched pair of snarling stone lions with curved fangs, bulbous eyes and clawed feet.

We walk up a ramp at the far end of a small stone square and enter a set of wooden swing doors. The young Asian woman at the cash register at the far end of the foyer looks up enquiringly before breaking into a smile of recognition. Boon waves airily and simply proceeds up a set of stairs without payment, although the sign near the register sets out all the prices quite clearly. ‘Something to show you,’ he says as we climb.

As I look in on each floor, I see ceremonial dragons, masks, ancient artefacts. It’s the museum Boon spoke of to Newlands, but it’s a Chinese museum.

I scowl fiercely. ‘Propaganda!’ I mutter, unsure why we’re here, as we emerge into a light, airy exhibition space on the top floor. ‘Now is not the time for me to get back in touch with my ancestral roots, or whatever. Couldn’t I just wait somewhere else while you run recon…?’

‘Just see,’ Boon says calmly.

The hall-like upstairs room we enter is filled solely with photographs. By the door are pictures of kids from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s in all the bad fashions and shocker hairstyles: quiffs, bowl cuts, shags, mullets, flicks and perms. They’re all Chinese, or variations on; caught forever in black-and-white or lurid technicolour. I bend and look at some of the names: Goon and Louey and all the weird bastardisations wrought by the Gods of Immigration, legalised forever. There’s a Peter Gok Kar and a Shirley Wing Loon; a whole dynasty of Quong Gongs, poor souls: Shirleys and Maureens and Denises, big toothy girls with long limbs and long faces, milk-fed skin.

Neither here nor there, just like me.

‘How long do I have to stay here looking, feeling, belonging?’ I demand accusingly. ‘Until it’s safe to go home?’

‘Look around for as little or as long as you like,’ Boon says mildly. ‘Just stop by my shop first, before you head on upstairs to your place? I’ll check the building; make sure there are no more surprises.’

He pats me on the shoulder, about to turn on his heel, when he seems to recall something. He takes my home telephone out of my hands and tucks it into my backpack, doing up the zip so firmly that I’m almost lifted off the ground. ‘You wanted to know,’ he says from behind me, ‘what was missing from your parents’ apartment? That detective asked me to tell you, but I can show you.’

Suddenly, I’m conscious of this sick, breathless feeling inside me, my pulse hammering in my inner ear. Boon crosses the carpet and I trail after him, surrounded by a diorama of grinning Asian faces: babies, toddlers, youths. We pass a section devoted to Chinese boys in matching football jerseys, posing in the classic, butch, arms-crossed way, tallest at the back, shortest at the front. Teams from the 50s straight through to the early 90s. ‘Ethnics’ versus ‘locals’. I can imagine the backchat and niggling at the sidelines. Must have been awesome.

Boon jabs a forefinger into one of the frames in passing and says, ‘That’s your dad, front row, centre. He was short until he turned fifteen, but he was fast. His trick was to keep running: ran all the bigger boys into the ground until they were too tired to kick straight or hold the ball.’

I bend, peering at the tiny image, heart in my mouth. So it is true; I do have his eyes. We lost all our photos in the fire and, even in dreams, I can’t recall his face. This is the first concrete proof I’ve ever seen that he even existed.

‘He’s in this one, too,’ Boon says, passing a school formal photo, all the boys in dodgy 80s tuxes, a scattering of frilled shirts; all the girls in horrid bright colours like emerald and scarlet and amethyst, with crimped hair and straight bangs, hideous corsages made of carnations. ‘Dance at the Melbourne Town Hall. Big deal at the time. To your dad, anyway.’

Dad’s a lot taller in this photo, stiff-looking in a black tuxedo, white shirt and ruby-red cummerbund, with a bogan haircut: spiky on top, short sides, long, mullety back. Haircut aside, I am shocked at his lean, tanned handsomeness. I look like neither of them, it’s true.

Some new animal.

Boon shoots me a quick look. ‘But you wanted to know about the missing photo?’ he reminds me.

He stops before a picture in the far back corner: of an olive-skinned little boy with a broad face, gappy teeth and the kind of terrible haircut that indicates an actual mixing bowl might have been involved. The boy has smiling dark eyes and a sprinkling of freckles across his nose, and is, inexplicably, dressed in a green Peter Pan costume with green stockings, hands fisted on his hips in a classic Errol Flynn-style pose. He can’t be more than six or seven, chubby and adorable, posed against a backdrop of powder-blue photographic curtain made up to look like a cloud-filled sky.

‘This is just a copy, of course,’ Boon murmurs. ‘The original was inside the frame. But this is it. This was what was taken off the wall in the apartment.’

Long after Boon’s footsteps on the wooden stairs have faded away, I stand under a shaft of late afternoon sunlight, just staring at my father as a child.