The dead bed, p.5
The Dead Bed, page 5
The bar was filling up again with a relaxed afternoon crowd. There was silent soccer on the TV now, played in driving English rain. Outside the pub, the light was almost gone but there was a yellow hue on things.
He now missed Ben with a maudlin, physical ache. Stuart returned from the toilet and Patrick told him that he was heading home.
‘Be the man!’ Stuart urged in reply, finishing his beer and glancing up at the soccer in the rain. Patrick suddenly couldn’t remember what man he was meant to be.
ANNIE
The arrangement worked.
She got her pills – ‘You’re not swallowing all these, are you?’ his white teeth asked, but he didn’t seem to care – and he got to plug into a life looser and more dangerous than his own. For him, it was like going back to university and getting the girl he had never got.
One day he told her he was uncomfortable dealing with feeling in his car.
‘I have a room,’ he said. ‘Very private. I have the only key.’
‘That sounds dangerous.’
‘Only if you want it to be,’ he said.
‘Why would you have such a room?’ she wondered aloud.
‘It’s a registered premises with the Pharmacy Board of Australia,’ he said. ‘Secure.’
That could kick things to a whole new level, she realised. And it would compromise him if things went wrong. In her experience, things usually did go wrong. The world was ruled by entitled fuckwits and she was doing her best in her own small way to change that.
THE ONLY CHILD
Patrick had done his best way back on that day after his university ‘lecture’ to snare Claire with his charms. It hadn’t worked.
Her friend was charmed and drank like the sponge she resembled. ‘Bundy and Coke. No ice. No straw,’ she recited every time he went to the bar. Claire agreed to a second beer but sat on it and kept herself tidy. He convinced himself that he liked that in a woman, even though it gave him the shits.
After four beers and Bundy and Cokes with no ice and no straws and no sign of relenting from Claire, and no more money, he decided to call it quits. With all this beer and nervous adrenaline, he was pissed anyway. He didn’t even try to get a phone number from Claire. He thought she was hot but she had this way of reminding him that he wasn’t hot himself.
He went home and wanked.
The end-of-year corporate party season was just cranking up. From Fridays through to Sundays Patrick woke up with hangovers, occasionally in other people’s houses and sometimes in other people’s beds. None of it meant much to him other than the miracle that it was happening.
When he met Sue, it was like the world slowed down. She was Chinese- Australian with a broad, happy face and a gold complexion. Her hair was as black as his was blond. She was smarter than him to the power of ten, he guessed. They met at the Sydney Opera House over glasses of sparkling wine. It was another early Christmas gig – he couldn’t remember who had invited him, maybe no-one – and, when he had told her his by-line (it was never just ‘Patrick’ at these events), she had swayed back a little and grinned.
‘Is that you?’ she asked.
‘Who?’
‘You! From the paper?’
What it was to be in Sydney on a warm night at the Opera House, the loud hum of voices filling the foyer, free grog. He leaned forward and bent to her ear. ‘That depends whether you like it or not,’ he whispered. He could smell her perfume.
‘Yeah, mostly I like it. It’s very clever. I like the word play.’
He bowed slightly, like a visiting conductor from Europe. They talked about him and how he came up with ideas, about deadlines, and he took two more glasses of sparkling wine from a tray as it passed. He wasn’t sure how much later it was when he finally asked what she did.
‘I play principal violin with the SSO,’ she said.
‘Wow!’ he blurted. He looked at her slender hand holding the glass. It looked naked and skilled and suddenly pornographic. He didn’t know a violin from a viola. ‘And what’s the SSO?’ he asked, to say something and regain his balance. She assumed he was being clever and laughed.
She had an apartment in an old art deco block in Rushcutters Bay and they went back there in a taxi before the night was worn out. It had high ceilings and polished wooden floors and not much furniture. There were two bedrooms. One was furnished with a music stand and an upright chair and two violin cases on the floor. There were neat piles of music scores stacked like totems against one wall. A sash window was wide open to the night and he could hear the clinking of sailboat rigging.
Was he out of his depth? Yes. He had never slept with a Chinese woman. Lurid teenage myths of horizontal fannies mingled with the fragrant perfume of frangipani wafting in from outside. She frightened and aroused him. They sat on a shabby club lounge and drank gin and tonics, listening to Jackson Browne’s The Pretender on vinyl through large speakers.
‘Why do you like this record?’ he asked, his head tilted sideways on the back of the lounge, looking at her dark eyes. She was slumped back too, looking at the high ceiling, her face a dish, her small breasts upright in a silk top. Her legs drifted open and closed.
‘He was born in Germany,’ she said. ‘It has some of that displaced sadness.’
‘He’s American!’ he said.
‘Of course. But actually not. That’s the secret.’
Patrick absorbed this. His legs swayed open and closed too now, a kind of sexual semaphore. ‘Were you born here?’
‘Yes, I was. But culturally, sometimes, I feel displaced too.’
‘And the ‘displaced sadness’?’ he wondered. She nodded. ‘Are you The Only Child?’ he asked.
She smiled. ‘Track five. You know the record. Yes. What about you?’
‘Yes, as well. My dad died in an accident at work when I was ten and when I left home, my mum moved into a small flat in Ashfield.’
He didn’t know why he was saying all this. Maybe it was the music. Maybe it was the serene atmosphere of her apartment. All he knew was that this felt different to the noisy other places that he had been. She was different as well.
‘I bet you miss your father,’ she said.
He thought about it but said nothing. He did miss him. His long absence when Patrick was learning how to be a teenager and a man. The melancholy record played. She put her hand on his thigh. Normally that would stop him thinking about sadness. Instead, this time, he began to cry. She put her arms around him and curled against him, small and warm as a cat.
They went to her bedroom. It was filled with a four-poster wooden bed with mosquito netting. The effect reminded him of those complicated sailing ships built inside a glass bottle. The only other thing in the room was a standing clothes rack with a few dresses on hangers. As he undressed in the light from the window, the gossamer dresses wafted like coloured skeletons in a breeze.
Their sex was tender and real. He felt huge. Lying afterwards in her arms, her small breasts softly against him, the masts in the bay clinking, the sweet air, the pale light through the gauze, a siren wailing somewhere up in the Cross, he was as happy as he could ever recall being.
The next day, Claire phoned. How did she even have his number?
She called him Professor Patrick again, which he knew was a joke, but he liked it. Apparently he had given her his number that day in the pub, written on a beer coaster. They agreed to meet on Friday in the same bar. He wondered if this was a mistake because he’d arranged to meet Sue again on Saturday and was looking forward to it. Everything with Sue had a kind of delicacy to it, a fineness and finesse. She was a vase of light.
But there was nothing wrong with meeting up with one of his old students, he told himself. He asked her whether Miss Bundy would be there as well and was pleased to hear that it would just be the two of them. It was almost a date.
When he got there, she was already sitting at a table against the wall, reading a street newspaper, a half glass of white wine on the corner of the table. The bar was crowded and noisy with Friday night. The jukebox was blasting a Queen song.
‘Hello!’ he shouted.
She looked up and smiled. ‘I didn’t think you were coming.’
‘Am I late?’ He was always late, even when he tried not to be.
She looked across at her wine. ‘By about half a glass.’ She wasn’t wearing a watch. In fact, she was unadorned. She was tanned skin in a tight blue T-shirt.
‘I’m sorry. Do you want another?’
‘I want to ask you something.’ He dragged a wooden chair and sat down. ‘Is that glass half full or half empty?’ she asked, pointing to her wine. He looked at the glass and then looked at her. She had green eyes and full pink lips and he looked at both and then back into her eyes.
‘I thought you were studying journalism, not philosophy,’ he said. ‘Or is that physics?’ She didn’t say anything but her gaze was friendly and interested.
‘Half empty,’ he said. ‘My fault, because I wasn’t here to drink it with you. And if I said half full you wouldn’t let me buy you another one, so what are you drinking?’
She leaned into his ear to counter the noise. ‘Riesling.’ He could smell it on her sweet breath.
The night went well. They drank in the pub until it was dark and then went to a cheap Lebanese restaurant that she liked near the uni. They drank more riesling out of tumbler glasses and ate bread and dips with their hands. She announced that her course had finished and she was no longer a student. They clattered tumblers. He felt like saying her life was ahead of her but realised that would make him sound old.
‘My results aren’t all in but I think I’ll do well,’ she beamed.
‘Such confidence! That’ll be the riesling,’ he joked. ‘Or the visiting professor. Why aren’t you out drinking with your mates?’ he asked.
‘I am,’ she said. It was a line too but it was a good one. He put his arm around her shoulder and dragged her towards him and kissed her lightly on the lips.
She wouldn’t go home with him. After much pleading, while she waited for a taxi, she agreed to see him again tomorrow. That was going to clash with Sue but now wasn’t the time to finesse.
In the morning he wandered around his small flat, feeling lousy and wondering what to do. He didn’t have Sue’s number. He seriously considered making his way across to Sue’s place – he remembered where it was – knocking on her door and apologising that he wouldn’t be able to meet as they had planned.
He would do that.
He didn’t do that.
He met Claire on Saturday night at a more fashionable bar than the pub on the corner near the uni. It went well. They agreed to meet again. And again. Good sex started.
He never met Sue again, although he remembered her well and once saw her on TV playing principal violin at the Sydney Opera House. Seeing her inside the TV was like the time she was in that sailing boat bed in a room in Rushcutters Bay.
KIDS, HEY?
He was woken with another hangover. Or was it the same one? He felt like he’d given whatever happened to Annie two days head start.
There was someone knocking on his front door. The bedside clock displayed 8:10am. Eve was wide awake to the commotion and, when the next knock banged, she jumped off the bed and headed for the back of the house. Scaredy cat.
Patrick slept naked and hopeful. He tossed the doona back and sat for a moment on the edge of the bed, his reliable morning erection more upright than his brain. He took a moment. He grabbed his jeans off the floor, pulled them on carefully.
Another knock. Who knocks that hard this early, he wondered? Badly dressed God botherers? A twenty-year-old with a clipboard on behalf of an African nation? One of those food-box companies?
He opened the door. Police. Again.
A man in a light brown suit – you didn’t see them much anymore – was holding ID up to Patrick’s bleary gaze.
‘Detective Cooper. I think we spoke on the phone. Mr Hyland?’
He nodded. Cooper was mid-forties, overweight, he looked like someone had pumped him up past what was safe and the brown suit might not hold. He had a buzz-cut ginger skull. He was the identikit opposite of Detective Senior Constable Harrison and Patrick already liked him for it.
‘Have you got news?’ he asked. Cooper shrugged his shoulders. Maybe. ‘Come in.’
He led them out to the sunroom. The room where things happened. The small lounge room in the middle of the house was too gloomy during the day.
The cardboard box of Christmas decorations was still on the wooden table. For fuck’s sake, put that back in a cupboard, he told himself. He put the Christmas decorations on the floor as a way of starting things and they both sat down at chairs around the table.
‘Actually, I’m going to go and put a shirt on,’ Patrick said.
‘Nice view,’ Cooper said when Patrick returned. It was another bright morning. The distant church spire, the old Kodak factory, now a block of flats. The valley was full of huge treetops from a park that ran along Orphan School Creek down into Blackwattle Bay.
‘Have you heard from Ben?’ Cooper asked.
‘No, and I know we’ve done this routine before, but have you?’
‘No. Is Mrs Hyland at home?’ he asked, looking around as if that might make her appear.
Patrick wished it was that easy. ‘She doesn’t live here. We’ve been separated for a year now.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Me too.’
The room went quiet. Cooper laced his fingers together and put his hands gently on the table. He met Patrick’s gaze. ‘Anne Benson. Twenty-eight years old. Good family. Semi-estranged. Complicated, like most families. University education. In fact, her father’s still a professor there at Sydney Uni.’
Patrick maintained eye contact. He was being the man. A man. What man? Did Stuart set this up? He closed his eyes. He was surprised how sad he felt for Annie’s parents. Ben was missing. She was dead.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘You never met her?’ Cooper asked.
‘No,’ he sort of lied. It was too late to go back and start again. He felt dizzy, so he opened his eyes again.
‘Her parents also didn’t know she was living with your son.’ Cooper grimaced a smile. ‘Two strays. Is Ben a drug user?’
Where was this coming from? Where was it going? ‘Prescription drugs, of course. Dope now and then. Bad for his schizophrenia.’ Cooper nodded. ‘He knows it’s bad for him and mostly he’s actually an anti-drugs campaigner.’
‘Harder drugs? Heroin?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure of that?’
‘Of course not. But I’d guess not.’
‘You’d probably know,’ Cooper said, apparently convinced that parents know their children. That was nice. Patrick felt like reaching over and touching those kind, clasped hands. ‘How long had they been together?’
‘A couple of months, I think. But until Ben showed up here, we didn’t know that he even had a girlfriend. We told Harrison. Ben disappearing like this is not unusual. In fact, it’s usual.’
‘Has he had other girlfriends?’
‘One or two, I think. Nothing serious.’
‘Have you ever known him to be violent – on or off prescription drugs?’
There were no marks on Annie. Pillows don’t leave marks.
‘No,’ he lied, hoping his voice was steady. ‘Shouty. Moody. Slamming doors. For the most part, even with his illness, he’s been a good kid.’
Cooper seemed to think about this. ‘My daughter, Polly, she’s thirteen, she has mild autism.’
Patrick was flummoxed. ‘I bet she’s beautiful,’ he said.
‘We think so. Not all her classmates do.’
‘Kids, hey? It’s not all beer and Skittles.’
‘No.’
‘I went to the house yesterday. Forest Street.’ Cooper seemed interested. ‘I thought Ben might be there. You can’t tell what Ben might do, and he does live there.’
‘No luck?’
‘No, but I met the cleaner you’d sent in.’
Cooper leaned back in the chair. ‘A cleaner?’
‘I didn’t get his name.’
‘Describe him.’
‘Blue overalls. Blue eyes. Beard. Fifties. Latex gloves.’
‘That’s interesting,’ Cooper said. ‘I don’t think he’s one of ours.’
‘Really?’
‘Cleaners go in if it’s been a violent crime scene. This one wasn’t. The housemate agreed that we didn’t need to send in the cleaners.’
‘Actually, I don’t think he said he was a cleaner. He said he was there to “fix things”.’
‘What time was this?’ Cooper produced a tiny notebook from his pocket and wrote in it.
‘Eleven-ish? He let me walk through the house with him. I wanted to see where Ben lived. What happens next? If Ben walks through the door there, are you going to arrest him?’
‘I’d start by interviewing him. He woke up and she didn’t. You can put two and two together.’
Patrick remembered an idea from his walk home. ‘I had a drink with a mate at The Nag’s Head yesterday. Maybe there’s CCTV of 102 Forest Street. It’s not far down the street...’
Fuck. It would show him! Arriving, and leaving with Ben.
‘Not operational,’ Cooper said. ‘We checked. A lot of venues would rather let their bouncers resolve a situation with no help from cameras or police.’
Patrick promised himself to be good for the rest of his life. ‘Just a thought,’ he said. He wanted to ask about the dart in Annie’s arm, but of course he wasn’t supposed to have seen it.
‘Keep up the good work,’ Cooper said, grinning and standing and offering his hand.
Patrick stood and shook it. ‘Can we get Ben’s phone back? It might help me track down where he’s staying.’
‘Have you got a number? That would help us too.’ Cooper got out his tiny notepad again.
‘No.’ Yes. It’s written on the cardboard flap of that box of Christmas decorations on the floor there. ‘I don’t understand. Harrison phoned me with it.’
