21

Hugh passes me at the tram stop on Toorak Road and doubles back. There are no trams to escape into, so all I can do is stand and watch the chrome grille of his coupé drawing closer. It reminds me of cartoon shark teeth.

He slides in at the kerb, right next to me, and lets the engine idle while the drivers in the cars behind him all pile up, beeping their horns and leaning out their windows, the effings flying. Still, Hugh just stares fixedly at me through the half-down passenger window, refusing to move along until I get in beside him.

I have a high embarrassment threshold and have every intention of looking the other way for as long as it takes, before getting on a tram. But the wind is really rising now, keening like a funeral mourner. Rain imminent.

I hate the cold. In all the moving around we’ve done, it’s been the one constant—how much I hate it. The whole time since Dad died, I suddenly realise, Mum has been working her way down the eastern seaboard, working her way back from when we were warm and safe in the north, the three of us together, to this. Closing some kind of circle that’s ending in wind and rain.

To a chorus of shouted oaths, kicking myself at my weakness, I get in, still hugging my backpack. Sitting with knees drawn primly together—as if that will somehow minimise my general surface area and volume—I catch sight of my reflection in the glass and grimace. My hair is hanging in tangled dreads all down my back and shoulders and my cheeks seem thinner, the bones and scars more prominent. I look like one of the witches out of Macbeth.

There are grass stains on Hugh’s torn shirt and red marks on his face, but all he says in a normal-sounding voice is, ‘The least I could do is drive you home,’ and then he guns it, the coupé’s engine roaring like a caged animal at the bottlenecks.

I study his profile, his downturned mouth, the line of his neck and jaw when he isn’t looking. He’s the kind of guy I would sleep with in a shot, I decide. I would give it up for a guy like this, no questions asked, because I’m as shallow as the next person. But Wurbik was right. Even if he could see past the scars, Hugh’s not for me; he’s not one of my kind. Being with him keys me up to a pitch that only dolphins can hear. Nothing would ever be easy. Around a guy like Hugh, I would always be falling over my feet and saying the wrong thing and kicking myself and kicking myself and kicking myself. I’d be flavour of the minute, not the month; I’d never even make it into the guy’s fucking fifth-house stars, that’s how fast he’d be through with me, and I might never recover. That’s nothing to aspire to.

Still, it will hurt me every day, knowing he’s out there, because I’m not going to forget him. I mean, who forgets meeting the dream guy? It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Some people don’t even get that. But it’s okay to let him go because he was never mine anyway, and I’ve at least seen him. I know he exists.

‘So I’ll live,’ I say out loud without meaning to, like they do in the soaps.

I cover my mouth with one hand, appalled, and Hugh darts me a curious, sidelong glance. ‘There’s living and there’s living,’ he says distantly, gazing back out onto the congested road ahead.

But he’s wrong. It’s all the one state. It’s just getting through, and not letting the absences overwhelm you.

‘Well, goodbye, then,’ I say as we drive under the painted arches of Chinatown, cringing at how banal and emotionless my words sound when all this, all this, is going on inside my head. This is the end of the road for him and me. There should at least be music. ‘And thanks, you know. For the lift.’

Ugh. Somebody sew my mouth closed, please.

My hand is on the door; I’m all ready to leap out and run from how much I suck at small talk. Hugh slides the car into a loading zone opposite my building and turns to me. ‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ he mutters. ‘I’d like to see you again.’

I blink. Two complete non sequiturs. The only thing connecting the two statements? The word see. Bloody nervous word-game disorder.

Hugh hasn’t turned the engine off, which makes it all sound even more matter-of-fact: that if he says he’d like to see me again it will, in fact, come to pass. He’s a go-getter, a hunter. He never gives up. I know that. It’s in his chart.

‘I’ve never met anyone like you,’ he says. Which sounds like a line, but it’s my line and I will hug it to me and milk it later, when I’m alone, for meaning. Turning it over and over incessantly, like a polished jewel. I blink again, everything spun on its head, and Hugh’s dark eyes are intent on me. ‘You said you couldn’t feel anything. But you knew about Fleur. No one will talk to me about her and you knew her name.’

I’m unable to summon up something sharp or sassy in reply. I just can’t. I’m suspended. He reaches out and actually touches the skin of my face: the scarred part, which warms instantly. And I don’t draw away. ‘Does that hurt you?’ he murmurs, leaning forward so that our foreheads are almost touching. The pad of his thumb is resting against my skin and I want to close my eyes and succumb because this guy, this guy, is better than Bio-Oil, better than psychotherapy. If he doesn’t see or mind the scars? Then there are no scars.

We’re leaning in, about to fall, about to do all those theoretical things that theoretical people in books do with their mouths and hands, when a familiar pattern, a worn-out blue plaid, moves into the corner of my eye and just stays there.

I glance up, startled, so that Hugh turns his head to look, too. It’s Simon in his knitted grey beanie. Standing very still across the road, right in my line of sight. Arms crossed, waiting for me. His eyes don’t leave me for a second and the moment between Hugh and I is fleeing; it flies.

Maybe we can get it back. Or maybe, says the voice of reason in my head, reasserting itself huffishly, you should just let it go, okay? You were saying goodbye. Quick ones are easier all round.

My own body fighting me, I sit back from Hugh. ‘I can’t,’ I say simply, ‘not right now.’

Hugh’s posture changes; going rigid. He knows it has something to do with the tall, beat-up-looking guy trying to melt the car from the outside with his grey-green eyes. He turns back quickly, moving so that Simon is entirely blocked from my view. ‘This isn’t the end of it,’ he warns, stroking the skin of my scar again with the pad of his thumb, bringing the heat. ‘I know where to find you.’

I move away from him, putting my pack back up between us like the fence that will always stand between the haves and the have-nots.

‘Everyone does,’ I reply quietly. ‘Best of luck with your life.’ Still holding his gaze, I open my car door and scramble out backwards, adding, like a gibbering numbskull, ‘Really, I mean it. It’ll be a great life. You’ll do great.’

I almost add, thinking better of it: Don’t let having a murderous sicko for a father hold you back. I shut the door—flushed and hot from shooting my mouth off like a fool. Over the roof of the car, all I see is Simon’s taut, bleak face, bones and bruises prominent.

The coupé moves off in a squeal of tyres—I register that, but I don’t really see it go—as I dodge across the street towards Simon. What are we, really? I’ve got nothing to feel guilty about, but I feel it. I’m hangdog, hesitant, like I’ve done something wrong, as I come up onto the kerb in front of him. Simon’s voice is biting, his arms still crossed. ‘Is that the rich guy Wurbik told me about? Why don’t you ever answer your damned phone? You aced it by the way. Dalgeish wasn’t even looking at me after you left. You held the floor then you wiped me with it. Prize is in the bag.’

His tone is as bitter as his body language and fury rises in me, sudden and sharp.

‘How is it my fault if I did better?’ I say incredulously. ‘You had all the answers. You were prepared. You stayed on point. I cried all over my shoes, for fuck’s sake. Give the fat, ugly chick a little credit for being able to—’

Simon cuts me off. ‘Hook a stud? He only wants one thing, Cen; it’s so obvious, it’s nauseating.’

I mean, look at you is what Simon’s really saying.

‘And, like, I’d just give it to him? Right there in his car in the middle of Chinatown?’ I screech, fumbling my house keys out of my bag and punching them into Simon’s chest so hard that he rocks backwards. ‘Like that’s all a rich, good-looking guy would want from me. Sex, not conversation? Not answers? He wants to know whether his dad is responsible for a cold-case rape-murder. And if he happens to like me as well? Well, isn’t that just my luck.’ Simon’s mouth is opening and shutting as I snarl, ‘Get out of my sight, you hypocrite. It’s okay for you to want all of those things—the beautiful life, all the trappings—but not okay for me. When I want it, when I want to reach out and take it because, maybe, just maybe, something’s being handed my way for a change, it’s not permissible. My motives are suspect, or his are. Don’t judge me.’

Simon tries to catch me by the sleeve but I step around him, almost dancing on my toes like a prize fighter. ‘I hope I do win the Tichborne, because if I do I’m going to buy you a car you can actually sleep in which will take you right out of my life. Do what you like,’ I add, pointing up at the darkened windows of my place. ‘Make yourself a sandwich. Plot my downfall. Shit, play me a word in a game you’re never going to win. I’m going for a walk.’

And a moment later I’m lost in the late-afternoon crowd moving uphill through Little Bourke Street, everyone hurrying to get somewhere, be somewhere. I duck through one alleyway, then another, finding that I know the streets like the back of my hand, like the local I never thought I was.

He calls and calls and I ignore him, not sure where I’m really going. People see the shine of tears on my face and stare; most just avert their eyes. When the rain comes down, in sheets, in torrents, I keep walking in circles and squares and zigzaggy lines while people rush and huddle and battle their pop-up umbrellas going inside out from the wind. The noise is immense, water rushing down the bluestone gutters, pooling in the dips and warps in the road. Soon my feet and shoes, the legs of my jeans are sodden. I pause outside the 7-Eleven on Exhibition Street feeling stupid about grand gestures, when this prickling starts up, in my gut.

Maybe I do feel things because I’m suddenly aware—an intense awareness—that I’m being observed.

I look across the road, my eyes searching the darkness under the deserted front marquee of the Comedy Theatre. But there is nobody there. Around me, people are hurrying to catch things—the pedestrian crossing, a blue bus, taxis. I am the only still point in a streetscape alive with motion. But the feeling won’t go away; it crawls across me, like something trapped under my skin trying to burrow its way out, and I step into the brightly lit convenience store, spooked.

I check my phone and it chooses that moment to emit the sparkly bling sound that happens when someone plays you a word. Fingers fat and wet and clumsy from the cold, I open the app, thinking it must be Mum, even though it can’t be. But I see that it is Changeling_ 29. Simon. Not with a word worth anything, but a message. My first message from him, ever.

Chilled to the core, I read: Where are you?? Get home. I’m worried.

Home.

And I realise it is. It’s a fetid dump, but in so many ways I’m connected to it now and I want to be there more than anything. But it’s at least three blocks away, more. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Tears welling in my eyes, I brush them away viciously as the Indian guy at the cash register looks on with suspicion because I’m not buying and I’m not talking. I’m just dripping water onto the floor by the newspaper stand, shaking like a drug addict over the screen of my phone.

Fumbling at the keypad, I type with bloodless fingers: I WANT to be home. Scared. Feel I’m being watched / followed. My words crop up in a golden bubble at the side of the game.

Simon’s answer comes back right away, slotting straight underneath in a bubble of white: Where are you? Come to you.

I think frantically, my eyes raking the windows facing out onto the Lonsdale and Exhibition Street intersection.

‘Can I help you?’ the Indian guy queries over my shoulder, but I just wave a hand in his direction, so that he takes himself back around the safety screen, pissed.

I know there is a narrow, dog-legged shortcut just around the corner that takes you back past the front of the Chinese Museum into Chinatown. I can wait there. In the museum, no one will want me to buy anything or move on, and it’s public enough that nothing can happen to me if I stand, dripping wet, by the pretty girl at the front counter.

I type: Chinese Museum, hurry. Hitting send, then sending one more word: Please.

Simon’s bubble comes back: Cohen Place, got it. Coming.

Then he does the same thing as me, sending another message hot on the heels of his last one: And you’re not, you know. Ugly. You’re kind of unforgettable, actually.

There’s no time to savour the amazingness of that perfectly punctuated message right now. Later, we can thrash out the exact context and parameters of his words, but for now I shove my phone deep into my jacket pocket and head back out the sliding doors.

Going left up Lonsdale, I see the half-hidden opening to the laneway just past a deserted souvenir shop, its windows full of sheepskin scuffs and Aussie flags, clip-on koalas. A man emerging from a pokies venue that opens onto the laneway actually pauses in his stride to let me pass, alerted by something in my face, in the way I’m holding myself.

I burst through the doors of the Chinese Museum and the girl behind the counter nods in bewilderment as I gasp, ‘Is it okay if I just wait here?’

That feeling, the crawling feeling, hasn’t for a moment gone away. A chill moves through my guts when I see through the museum’s long front windows: a dark shape emerging from the laneway I’ve just come from, wet grey hair plastered to his gaunt, familiar features.

As his head quests from side to side, turning towards the museum’s doors, I back further into the building, hoping I haven’t been seen. The woman calls out, ‘Miss? Miss!’ as I start running up the stairs.