Dark Matter (9 page)

So why couldn’t he let it rest?

He lifted a spoon to his mouth and sucked
soggy cornflakes from it. It was barely eight o’clock and he had already been
daydreaming.

Jordy sat opposite, balancing a cup
brimming with coffee in one hand, holding a sheaf of paper in the other.

“Hey, Einstein,” said Jordy. “Can I call
you Einstein?”

“No.”

“Pack your bags. We’re going to
Disneyland.”

“What,
the
Disneyland?” said
Rasputin in monotone.

“No. I lied, Poindexter—can I can call you
that?”

“No.”

“Disneyland was my little joke. We’re going
to Melbourne.”

“What’s in Melbourne, Bill (as in Gates)—can
I call you that?”

“Sure.”

Amiable prat.

Jordy continued. “Temptation auditions.”

Rasputin sat silent and still, spoon poised
before his lips. No reason to hurry. The cornflakes weren’t getting any
soggier. In fact, there was every chance they would begin to crisp up again.

Jordy slipped a sheet from the sheaf of
paper.

“Two tickets to Melbourne on tonight’s
red-eye. Mum has been using her credit card like a whetstone. She has frequent
flyer points to spare.”

He was serious. Rasputin placed the spoon
back in his bowl and nudged it away. His mouth had gone dry, which was funny.
He had always assumed that was a literary invention.

It was still dry when that night he tipped
awkwardly into a window seat of Qantas Flight 785 from Perth to Melbourne. He
had never flown before, and Jordy had insisted on him taking the window.

Ethereal elevator music wafted about the
cabin. Outside, angry red and yellow lights held back the night sky and
illuminated airport staff buzzing in and out of sight beneath the plane’s
belly. They disturbed him, in the way he imagined Caesarean delivery crews
disturbed a prospective mother. A cargo hatch closed and sent a shudder through
the plane.

Amateur surgeon. Great.

Rasputin and Jordy had been the last to
board. Rasputin had refused to board at the call for children and disabled. Dee
and Jordy had had a moment together. Then she had hugged him and told Jordy to
look after him. She had glanced at his cane when she said it, though Rasputin
thought she had tried not to.

A hostess came past with newspapers and
magazines. Jordy took
The Australian
. Rasputin leaned over him, but
before he could ask for a paper, Jordy waved her on.

“You’re on a reading plan,” he said, and
from his bag produced an encyclopaedia.

“What are you, my agent?”

He smiled evilly. “Agent, coach, scrutator,
whatever. Just read.”

Rasputin grimaced. Jordy leaned over, and
said, “You do realise this could be your ticket to the big city. Why stop with
the bills. Temptation is just a beginning.” He winked. “The road goes ever on.”

At his words, an image flashed through
Rasputin’s mind of Bilbo Baggins setting forth under a star-scintillated sky.

“But why an encyclopaedia? Why can’t I read
that?” He indicated the paper covering Jordy’s lap. “It’s current. They ask
current.”

“It’s rubbish.”

“So why are you reading it?”

“Good IT section. Plus, if I get cold,
broadsheets make passable rugs.”

The plane took to the sky with a roar of
defiance. Rasputin felt pressed into his seat, and couldn't help smiling. Disneyland
had been right after all.

Jordy clasped headphones over his ears.

Over the thrum of the plane’s labouring
engines, Rasputin said, “You look like Stevie Wonder.”

Jordy lifted an ear-cup and said, “What?
These are noise cancelling.”

“I said, you look like Stevie Wonder, when
he was hip.”

Jordy put the paper down, leaned back into
the chair, closed his eyes and said, “And I’m going to sleep like I got hit by
a Valiant.”

“Except you’re not black,” Rasputin went
on.

Jordy’s breathing slowed.

“And you can’t sing.”

Jordy’s mouth fell open. Rasputin couldn’t
believe it. Asleep in under two minutes. A new record.

He turned his attention to the
encyclopaedia lying in his lap. It was a Funk and Wagnall’s circa the 70s. They
were a dollar a pop in charity shops. He turned back the cover and began to
read.

“Did you know the Aardvark—” he shouted,
and then remembered Jordy was asleep.

The plane dropped toward Tullamarine
airport in the pre-dawn gloom. Rasputin’s face was plastered to the window. His
hands gripped his chair. He had watched since the hum of the engines had
changed pitch, and his ears had popped. The runway appeared below, stretched
out to receive the plane, and then raced like a river in tumult, daring it to
find safe purchase.

At the baggage carousel Rasputin and Jordy
joined the throng waiting for it to come to life. Most waited silently, pensive
or half-awake. The smell of percolating coffee drifted from a niche café squatting
at the end of a row of hire car counters. It lured a few stragglers. The snap
of its cash register was jarring in the quiet.

The carousel lurched to life. Miraculously
their bags emerged first. Jordy hauled them into the brisk air outside, and
they caught the first taxi in the rank.

As they crossed the Bolte Bridge at ten
clicks above the limit, Rasputin got his first view of Melbourne city. The CBD
was a mass of spires anchored in darkness and twinkling with multi-hued light.
The first rays of sunlight were glancing off the eastward facets making the
city a cluster of crystal. Rasputin cupped the city in his hand and, for a
moment, possessed it.

Their hotel was a grey block tucked away in
a sun-starved lane in the CBD. Jordy slumped onto one of the single beds.
Rasputin used the toilet.

“Barely enough room to swing a cat in
here,” he said, pivoting on the spot to avoid sitting in the sink. His cane
rapped the porcelain, evoking a dull clang.

“Always room to swing a cat,” Jordy replied
sourly, and was soon asleep again.

Rasputin moved about the room, picking over
its contents. It gave an initial sense of warmth, but he soon penetrated the
illusion. The room was dead like the needle-strewn carpet of a pine forest. In a
drawer by the bed he found a Gideon’s bible, and leafed through a few pages
before returning it. On a mantel above a row of coat hooks sat a small, die-cast
sailing ship, proxy for ornaments on warm hearths the world over. He picked it
up and enjoyed its heft. He toyed with the idea of boiling the kettle, but knew
it would wake Jordy. Besides, he wasn’t thirsty. He had plenty of caffeine
buzzing in his veins, which put sleep out of the question. The auditions would
start at five that night.

He retrieved paper and a pen from his bag,
and then slipped through the door to the balcony. Outside the air was cold.

The balcony was a concrete perch that held
a small table and chair. The view it afforded was of more grey blocks and, at
the end of the lane, a building façade running at right angles, aflame with the
rising sun.

He sat, arranged the paper on the table,
and readied his pen. He prepared himself to recall a memory. Panic darted
foxlike through him. Then he forced his consciousness downwards,
within
,
his will a hand plunging his own head beneath the waves. Swallowed by his mind’s
eye, he stood again at the centre, and in every direction the galaxies of his
memory blazed.

He sought a very old memory, one of the
oldest. He found it quickly, amid the kaleidoscope, a distant supernova.

He pulled it near, the eye’s focus
extending telescopically into the distance to retrieve it. The memory was like
a rose, wrinkles of interlocking manifolds, an organic, five-fold bundle of
sense.

He pried it open.

Laughter and screams wafted from it like
perfume. Something terrible had happened. But he already knew that.

He was three years old, his
self-consciousness dawning. Though his eyes and ears had worked as they did
now, they were warped by the feebleness of a toddler’s understanding. Images,
sounds, and smells dashed against him disjointedly, and would not cohere. He
concentrated, tried to impose order on these unparsed senses. He felt the wind
bite on the sweat of his face.

He hunted for a face. A girl’s face. Her
face. He dug for it like a dog at a buried bone.

The first thing he saw was a flock of white
birds, and he felt the echo of his toddler’s excitement. They had been novel.
He could name them now, seagulls. The recognition unlocked another image, of
vast, frothing blue water. The ocean. That had been novel too. He felt more
than saw the presence of two people. Mother and Father. They were near and far
like the sky. He heard a giggle, saw a girl run past with bouncing hair. She
turned and he beheld her face, vivid and clear.

Her arms were extended, hands cupped
together. From them came the gleam of white shell. Cockle shells.

Cockles.

The word was like the closing of a circuit
breaker. It was an itch his fingers had hunted for a long time finally
scratched. Another memory mingled with this for a moment—
warms the cockles
of your heart
—and was gone.

Then the earth moved. An image, hitherto
hidden in the rose’s heart, smote him. He saw the girl crumpled beneath a car
wheel, one leg bent unnaturally. His adult mind knew she was dead.

Dizziness swept over him. He realised he
had stopped breathing. He released the memory, let it collapse upon itself and
drift away. He opened his mouth and gulped air.

The view from the concrete perch reasserted
itself. The daylight had grown stronger. The city’s hubbub was rising from the
streets.

He had not found what he sought, but he
remembered her face. He began to sketch it.

When Jordy woke an hour later, he found
Rasputin on the balcony, staring into space. Beneath his arm, secured against
the wind, was a portrait of a girl, cloven in two by the sun’s angling rays.

* * *

It was past two before Jordy and
Rasputin emerged from their hotel. As they navigated the CBD’s maze toward the
audition, Rasputin was struck by the contrast Melbourne made to Perth. Here
lush grass sprouted beneath ornamental trees and untended verge. In dry Perth,
even in spring, grass grew with restraint in foreknowledge of summer’s hammer. Melbourne
felt older, too. It spoke with the rumble and spark of trams, and wore clothes
fraying at the seams.

Near the railway, Rasputin fingered posters
plastered so thick on a billboard they hung in curls like dog-eared paperbacks.
Graffiti covered them in an urban poetry of expletives and tags. One oddly
unobscured phrase caught Rasputin’s eye. It was scrawled in paint like prop
blood, and said, “There is a hope.” Or perhaps it said ‘home’.

They crossed the Yarra River at Flinders Street
Station and found a café on the Southbank strip to unload their feet and eat
Turkish bread. Rasputin watched cruise ferries chug to and fro on the brown
water of the upside-down river while he tried to force the bread down his dry
throat. He gave in and laid two-thirds of the sandwich down. He hung his head
over the back of his chair, closed his eyes, and sighed. The lowering sun filtered
through his eyelids a deep red, and warmed his face. For a moment he forgot
about the audition.

Chunks of Turkish bread were still
inching down Rasputin’s throat when he entered the waiting room. It was an
anteroom crammed into the guts of the Crown complex, which lay along the river,
and rose up in stacks of identical casino floors, and restaurants, bars, and
shops. The mood of the crowd was that of a proctologist’s waiting room.

The doors opened at 5pm sharp. Jordy said,
“Good luck,” thumped Rasputin on the shoulder and left.

The audition, which had reared up in
Rasputin’s imagination as a many-headed, clawed thing with bad-breath, was, in
the event, a written test. He received a blank piece of paper and pen, and
allowed himself a smile.

A twenty-something girl, dressed in a neat,
black executive suit-top and skirt, with channel-9 badge affixed, instructed
them in an overly loud voice.

“Fifty questions. A few seconds to answer
each. Any questions?”

“Fifty, apparently,” he quipped to himself,
then readied his pen.

“Question One.” She glanced at her folder,
and launched the first challenge: “Who was Australia’s first Prime Minister?”

He panicked.

It was his driving test all over again and
he couldn’t find the steering wheel. In his mind, second hands raced on the
faces of a million clocks, while part of him worked the question backwards to
pry it for hidden meaning.

Then clarity.

It was a simple question. A primary
schooler’s question.