If I had begun to consider leaving the city, it was here, in this muddle of auspices and water and lovers formed in the shape of failed rivers, that I now locate the source. Long afterwards it is easy to see the ways in which you thought you knew the story. You follow along the banks of the river and observe its course. But then the future falls apart at the seams. When the river trickles out into salt plains it’s more than you can bear.
So, why, you begin to ask, should I not abandon this place? There is nothing left for me here. Just snakes in the water. Just sirens. Just phones ringing.
That night a marginally famous actor was at the Courthouse. There had been a few years when you could expect to see him drinking every night in Newtown. The actor had put on weight and didn’t look much like the man who had been on TV a few years earlier. Whenever I saw him he was drinking, and eyeing young women. I still thought he was handsome, and wanted to be one of the women he looked at, but even when he was tipsy and smiling in a corner of the beer garden there was something bitter about him that made it seem inadvisable to approach.
I pointed out the actor when Clemmie came back from the bar with a jug of beer. Her hair had dried from the beach into stiff waves. That guy again? she asked. I guess he hasn’t been around as much lately, has he. She swept a finger across the spilled beer and brought it to her mouth.
Across the table from Clemmie sat two people I’d only met in passing once before. A woman with shiny hair, and her boyfriend, an underfed, nervy man whose name I had forgotten.
Maybe he got better, said the shiny-haired girl.
Nah, I don’t think so, said the boyfriend. Friend of mine told me that the other week he was walking home after a night out. Passes by the BP in Erskineville. The one by the railway line. And that bloke was laying into some poor guy with a bunch of tattoos while his girlfriend stood to the side, just crying for him to stop.
The actor had punched the man with tattoos in the face five times, the boyfriend said. The man’s jaw had cracked. His nose had smashed. Blood trickled into his eyes. And the actor, when he was done, had started half-apologizing, pacing, wringing his fist as though it hurt him. Then he stormed away from the BP while the tattooed man bled into the asphalt.
Guess he didn’t get better, then, I said.
Nup.
At midnight the Courthouse closed. We bought longnecks and bottles of bad white wine from the bar. Clemmie hid them in her bag before we caught the bus outside Newtown Station. She was too drunk to drive us to wherever we were going now.
The boyfriend of the girl with the shiny hair said these were good people. Friends of his, living in a building that had once been used to care for disabled children. The door opened, and a barefoot man ushered us down a dank corridor to what passed for a kitchen. The place was dark inside, with barbed wire over the windows. The ceilings were high, and unseen voices from other rooms echoed off the walls with the thump of the music. It was hard to say how many people were there, in the building, in all those abandoned rooms.
I walked along the hallway, approaching the thudding music. At the end of the building, an entryway opened into the source of the sound. One of the rooms had once been used for hydrotherapy, when the building still served its purpose. The swimming pool was smaller than average, and now that it had been emptied of water you could see the descending oblongs of space dug deeper into the concrete, until eventually even the tallest person would be totally submerged. The deepest part of the swimming pool was only a few feet long, and had been covered over with a blue tarp to form a kind of ceiling. From above, windows let in the light of the moon from outside. It was oddly peaceful, standing in that wide, empty space, all sounds echoing off the dry swimming pool tiles. I climbed down a ladder to get inside the empty pool. Below the surface, there were couches, bongs, and a television that was turned on but emitted nothing except a glowing purple light. Somebody had written the word love on the screen with strips of gaffer tape.
You like it? asked one of the men sitting in the swimming pool.
Sure, I said. I was sitting on the sofa. The men snickered. There was a joke I wasn’t in on.
I sat in silence on one of the sofas while the men passed a joint from hand to hand. I did not like the way that the television glowed, and the close smell of the space below the tarp. Nothing had ever been cleaned. I wondered why I did not just go home. Only it seemed that leaving would cause some sort of a fuss, and I did not want to seem rude, did not want to look like I couldn’t hack it. Whatever this place was, it was meant to be fun, and I was meant to be enjoying myself.
A clattering above my head and a platform sandal on the ladder announced the descent of Clemmie into the swimming pool. The men looked up and followed her body as it stumbled towards me on the couch, handing me her beer for a sip and slinging her arm around me as though she were weightless. She was offered the joint and she took it.
When she turned to me she asked what was wrong. She observed that I was not being chill, and put her arm around me, as though her affection might make me more at ease in the sweet fug of marijuana and disquiet.
Hey, Clemmie asked, you want to hear something weird? The other day I got off the train at Marrickville and on the platform I found a wallet. It had some money in it, and the woman’s licence and everything. So I took it to the police station, like, just walked it over there. And I guess it was Monday afternoon, so it was sort of a weird time of day. But I went to the police station and walked into the waiting room.
Waiting room?
Or whatever it is. It was so eerie. Because I stood there and stood there, but there was nobody behind the desk, and nobody came. It was just empty. And I started to get freaked out, because the door was open, I’d walked right in, but the longer I waited, I started thinking how weird it would be, if the people that run the police had just up and left. Like, what would it be like if everyone who was meant to keep us safe, the city’s protectors, what if they were just gone. No one to take the wallet from me, I could just go out and use the woman’s money, there was no one to hand it to, no one to give it back to her. Just complete freedom to do whatever you wanted because there was no one to enforce the rules anymore.
They showed up, though, right? Someone took the wallet from you.
Yeah. Took a long time, though.
I’ve felt like that sometimes being at Triple Zero, especially the first week. When the police line takes a long time to connect through. Like, maybe there’s nobody there in the police dispatch center. Maybe they all just up and left. And I’m the only person left for whoever is on the phone freaking out. They freak out more the longer the phone rings, and I keep telling them the police will answer as soon as they can, as though I know what the police are doing, but I don’t really know. Literally the only thing I know is that the phone is ringing. Maybe one day they won’t answer at all.
Yeah, it’s weird, huh?
We sat together in companionable silence, Clemmie gently combing my hair with her fingers. We were always touching each other, had been always, since we were twelve-year-olds. Picking leaves out of each other’s hair, wiping away biscuit crumbs from skirts, smudging badly applied makeup on each other’s cheeks.
I turned to her. Do you still walk home with your keys between your fingers?
Yeah, mostly.
Clemmie had told me, the year before, about the trick her ex-boyfriend had taught her. He had advised her that if you wanted to fuck somebody up, you could throw a punch with a key wedged between each of your fingers. He advised her to walk down the street at night like this, just in case.