Black Teeth (14 page)

If the house had looked like this in 1999, you could believe that someone got murdered here. But you know it didn't. You know that, back then, it was crafted and spruced and maintained.

Just like the homes either side. Thin, protected dwellings where you imagined the children wore spotless school uniforms and the mothers spoke authoritatively to cleaners and gardeners who also wore uniforms. The pots for the pot plants were perfectly coordinated and the ceramic tiles along the porch perfectly uncracked. It was surely only the memory of what had happened at number 486 that kept these people from demanding their neighbour fix the garden, paint the house. Or maybe they did demand it, but he was such a user-interface disaster he never twitched.

Rudy says, ‘Prime Life? Is that, like, is that the…Prime Life?'

From my car I watched the sidewalks and the eucalypts and everybody going to work. After two hours it seemed that waiting for Rudy Alamein like this was way ambitious and the true burden of sitting forever turned my mood. When Tyan had assumed, as I had, that Rudy would surely
leave the house
on any given day, it was an assumption based on normal patterns of behaviour. Perhaps Rudy Alamein was not subject to normal patterns of behaviour. It was entirely possible, I thought as I switched to the passenger seat for the legroom, that Rudy hadn't left the house since the last time he'd actively stalked Glen Tyan.

So I noodled at my phone, updated my Steam but mostly I was getting hungry, thinking about slipping off to a bakery when the massive wooden door peeled open and a man scurried out.

Behind me now, that same man says, ‘And if that's what I get, what's the…what does it…you know?'

I wasn't able to say at first if this was Rudy Alamein, the eleven-year-old in the only photo of him I'd ever seen. I'd thought the red hair would give him away but there was almost none to speak of, balding in his mid-twenties and what growth there was was cut short. But the roundness of his head and the quick, jerky movements
of his body sealed it for me
. This is the demeanour
, I thought,
of a numpty twentysomething wastrel bent on revenge
.

Rudy's hands were buried deep in the pockets of his black jeans and his Goretex jacket was done up to the neck and he approached the street with a kind of stomp. At first the stomping seemed necessary, to navigate that insane front yard, but then Rudy prised open the wrought-iron gate and came onto the sidewalk and it was clear that this was how he rolled, killing bugs with every stride.

I couldn't very well follow leisurely in my car and so I was out, crossing the road, hiding my own hands from the cold. Rudy ran to catch a tram that trundled up from Montague Street and I ran too, hoping to seat myself opposite and to seem as though I was texting a friend when actually I'd be taking a picture, but Rudy moved swiftly to a seat beside an old-timer, forcing her to clear her shopping for him, blind to the inconvenience this was, even accidentally kicking over a bag as he went, prompting her leathery face to pout and search the crowd for someone to validate her disbelief. There was no space in front of him, not even to stand, so I sat behind Rudy against the window. The carriage had barely taken off before his phone rang. Rudy answered it with, ‘Yes? Hello?' and followed up with these timorous inquiries about whatever the fuck.

The tram passes Kings Way and frees itself of traffic and picks up speed, really motors so even dreadlocks with his stone face and wide legs shoots an anxious glance out the window.

Then Rudy says, in a voice that's loud enough to demonstrate he doesn't know how loud he is:

‘Right, so that's, like…Does it matter if I go to jail?'

23

The words trigger an instinctive turn of my head and I confront Rudy's reflection in the window, the phone held to his ear. A sharp voice warbles within, female perhaps. Then I see a mark on his hand that might be a trick of reflected light…

A tattoo on the webbing. A crown, about an inch across, four stalactites poking up towards the gap between his thumb and forefinger, filled in with a weak black ink like a horizontal triforce. I strain to look closer but the hand pulls away—Rudy is out of his seat.

Plunging down Swanston Street now, past the town hall into the city proper. I have time to casually stand and excuse my way to the front, steal a glance at Rudy who's waiting at the centre doors with the phone still to his ear.

Even from this far away: ‘Not now. Not now. Can I, yeah…Just, I don't know, yeah.'

We step into the bustle and throng of the Bourke Street Mall and instantly I regret my choice of the front exit because outside in the dimness and fog, fighting through crowds fighting to get onboard, Rudy has vanished like a magic trick.

I wonder if he sensed a disturbance in the force and made a run for it, but there he is, stomping his way along the tile work, past the shivering buskers that have somehow drawn a crowd. Various hands hold mobile phones aloft to periscope the performance and it would be the perfect cover for photographing Rudy if only he would stop to watch. He doesn't, hands dug into those pockets, his phone
conversation finished. I fall in behind, don't feel conspicuous because of all these other strangers. Also because Rudy moves with his head down, scared of other people or just not used to them.

We veer to the Myer department store where Rudy lingers, reading the store guide, a great stone tablet by the entrance. Beside it there's an interactive version; he doesn't want that one. I loiter outside, examine the store windows and their swanky knowing mannequins until Rudy finds what he's looking for and he's off. When I enter a blast of warm air greets me like a shot of nuke to the neck.

Through the make-up and perfume and the pancake faces of the women who work here I'm hoping Rudy won't take the elevator: he'll get a solid look at me if we're its only occupants. But he rides the escalators and with each floor I'm noticing how everything is white and spacious like the whole place wants to be an Apple store. It's different to the last time I came, with Mum about ten years ago, shopping for socks and boxer briefs. I didn't want to be here, was a total shitlord and bitched all afternoon and Mum couldn't wait to get me home. The memory is like an electrocution and I have

to concentrate to hijack my own thoughts, flick the band on my wrist and take off my jacket.

On the top level Rudy arrives at Video and Photography, but I hang back in Home Entertainment Systems and quickly lose sight of him; saunter, casual, to the rows of SLRs and handycams, don't know where he is, can't see another human being until the searching look on my face invites a uniformed stooge with a pink lanyard to ask if I need help. Derpily I decline, drift to the far side of the store and with no glimpse of Rudy I worry again that I've been sprung.

Then a figure passes behind me while I'm focussed on the GoPro accessories and by the hair standing up on my arms I know it's him. I move on towards a great nest of futuristic cameras and circle around.

At the end of the row stands an enormous flat television showing nothing. But then he's on it, his face the size of a weather balloon. Staring down at me like he can see me, like he's God and this is Judgment Day.

I draw back, spooked, look away to the empty clerk's desk and a hundred other screens featuring Rudy's head. Over there, among the cameras on tripods, real-life Rudy is gazing deep into one of the lenses, unaware that it's narrowcasting him all across the store and to this display as big as a billboard.

Without so much as changing my stance, I raise my phone and photograph the image. It's crisp, as good as any I'd have taken if I'd stuck the camera in his face and bolted like a purse snatcher. Rudy's flat nose, his rounded head and lightly freckled face give him the look of an unpeeled potato. What he wants with that camera is not clear—he seems to be picking something off the side of it, affording me a moment of appraisal. The small lips hang slightly ajar, green jacket done up to his chin like a Chinese communist, but it's the depth of fear in those eyes that demonstrates, to anyone who cares to look, the instability of Rudy Alamein. Even here, where no one knows him, where he's oblivious to me and the suspicions of Glen Tyan, where he's entirely self-involved, Rudy's eyeballs tingle and dart, under siege.

That face makes me want to leave.

And I'm right about to. My neurons have already ordered my feet to pivot, to carry me directly to the escalator and back to my car on Grand Street. But in that instant there's a new figure on the giant TV. Rudy is at once startled, then grinning. They hug and release, reveal the smiling, loving face of someone who, just yesterday, promised me she'd steer clear of Rudy Alamein.

24

I'm in a florist taking pictures with my phone when a shop clerk appears beside me.

‘We'd prefer you didn't photograph our arrangements.'

‘Why not?'

‘We'd just prefer you didn't.'

‘Because it's a secret? You don't want people to know what flowers look like?'

I don't say that last part but I think it as I leave the store and loiter at a food stand that spruiks the warming powers of soup. I pretend to be choosing between nutmeg-pumpkin and fennel-chickpea when in fact I'm watching Beth and Rudy, seated in a café at the exit onto Little Lonsdale. That's what I was doing in the florist, monitoring them over my shoulder with my phone's selfie lens, so I suppose I should be pleased the cover worked, that actually it looked like industrial espionage.

Beth and Rudy chat and drink juice and despite Rudy's face being permanently terrified they seem to be getting along, not like boyfriend and girlfriend but affectionate and chemically conducive. It reminds me of Marnie, how she and I are sitting around, awaiting the inevitable. Maybe Rudy and Beth have the same dormancy to overcome.

I should call Marnie. We haven't spoken since the pizza incident.

At last they stand, hug again, go their separate ways: Rudy past the florist, past me and back the way we came; Beth across Little Lonsdale and into Melbourne Central.

I stay with Beth.

She bought something in the camera store. In fact she bought a camera. Rudy just hovered, didn't make eye contact with anyone until it came time to pay and he was insistent. There followed a classic nanna fight and she seemed genuinely annoyed, but he waved his credit card so fiercely at the cashier that the transaction was completed almost as an act of self-defence. Beth couldn't hide her embarrassment, resolved it all with a kiss on his cheek and led him here to the café.

Now she leads me deeper into Melbourne Central, stopping to glance in the windows of these chic af clothing stores and I maintain a distance, make sure to keep my reflection out of those windows. Her transformation from yesterday was to be expected but it's still compelling. That bedraggled hair is curly and expansive: Professor River Song's only darker. Instead of a stained bathrobe she wears a blazer with green embroidery and a sort-of-elastic shirt beneath with horizontal stripes. According to the fashion police you're not supposed to wear that kind of shirt if you're large around the tummy but she flouts the rule so majestically that she proves what horseshit it is. All she has in common with yesterday are those glasses, a point of refinement on her rosy, peering face.

More escalators, down down to Melbourne Central station. She knows her way through the turnstiles, past the black and yellow posters that explain how to use escalators and then further underground to platform three, the Upfield line—she's going home.

‘I'm surprised to see you.'

She turns and there I am, leaning against the glossy cream brick. A James Bond entrance I straightaway regret.

‘The last we spoke you said you wouldn't be in contact with Rudy Alamein.'

It's almost as if she doesn't recognise me—the way she hesitates, freezes even, eyebrows questioning.

Then she comes to life, blinks quickly. ‘I'm sorry. I'm so sorry…'

Blink blink blink.

‘He called me and I just couldn't turn him down…you know…'

‘Sure.'

She squirms against the shiny metal pipes that are meant to be seats. The big TV on the tunnel wall shows two young people kissing after sweetening their breath with something like a can of mace.

She says again: ‘I'm sorry,' drenched in so much panic that I have to say: ‘Don't worry about it.'

‘I didn't know what to do…'

‘Why did he want to see you?'

‘Ummm…' She seems to have forgotten. ‘He told me he wants to sell some furniture.'

‘Why?'

‘He's broke, I think.'

‘No, I mean, why tell you?'

‘
Oh!
' She cackles at the confusion, overdoes it because she's nervous, even face-palms for what a dunce she is. ‘It's my work. Antique furniture. At least, I'm still trying to get it off the ground. But it's, you know…'