Dark Roots (13 page)

So when I needed $700 in a hurry, I kind of back-pedalled and had a think about picking up on those disguised gods. Those windows of opportunity. Had my bargain antennae tuned and ready to go.

You've got to get early to Camberwell. Round dawn you can spot the dealers with eyes like minesweepers. I hate the place at 6.00 a.m., like it again by 8.00, and by 11.00, when the sun's beating down and folks are walking round with armfuls of flowers and a felafel, it's the king of markets to me. The world is there spread out on a blanket, in all its shabbiness and failure and optimism and triumph.

Seven hundred dollars, I was thinking to myself as I strolled, eyes peeled for something antique, something overlooked, one of those stories you hear — brass lamps painted with old house paint, grandad's priceless stamp collection, the book with the spidery author's signature and faded annotations. Open your mind, I told myself, and invite those gods in. It had to be coincidence that I was humming a violin concerto when I spotted the violin. Snapped the locks and checked inside — nice colour, good wood. I knew bugger-all about violins, but I was in that kind of mood. Hairs on the back of the neck rising. Feeling lucky, feeling like I was due for a break. I held it up as if I knew a thing or two about violins and squinted along the neck, or whatever it's called. Ah yes. They've called in the violin expert, the top man. There's been no expense spared. The pegs looked all right, though. Could be ivory.

It was a long shot, a very long one, but like I said, I attract the kinds of things that people shake their heads over. I looked inside the violin — some handwritten name on the wood in there. My palms were sweaty. It felt good, it felt valuable, it felt like it might be worth something to my friend in the business.

‘How much for the violin, then?'

And got the answer you crave.

‘I'm not sure … it's my brother's … he's gone overseas to live and he doesn't play any more. We're cleaning out his wardrobe.'

Oh, thank you gods of coincidence and lessons whose significance is beyond me.

‘So what's it worth to you?' I made my voice non-committal; I should have been in TV. I put it back in the case and made my eyes rove over other stuff on the table and, to aid my charade, actually picked up a 400-piece jigsaw puzzle in a box well secured with masking tape and looked at it seriously. A picture of the Vienna skyline. I gazed at it with a studied lack of interest.

‘How about $100?' she said. Tentatively. Would it have been bad karma to haggle?

‘Tell you what,' I said. ‘Chuck in the jigsaw and I'll give you $80.'

She shrugged. Bonanza. Bullseye. Too bad, shifty dealers and hawk-eyed music buffs. This priceless instrument is mine. I gave her four twenties and beat a retreat. Past the guy who thinks he's Elvis, who was sounding more like Tom Waits by this stage of the morning. Past the kransky hot-dog stall and the litter of domestic cast-offs at the northern end of the market. Dropped fifty cents into a busker's case. And sloped off home. Where, just out of interest, I opened the jigsaw box.

Let me tell you a story, a connoisseur story of coincidence. There I was trundling down the ‘down' escalator at Flinders Street Station, jammed into crowds of people, when who should I see but an old girlfriend I hadn't seen in ten years going up the escalator across the way. She was in blue. Oblivious to my calling and waving, she disappeared up the moving stairwell. I was seized with an overwhelming urge to say hello, and at the bottom I turned and raced back up her escalator and was deposited in the whirlpool of commuters on the ground floor. No sign of her. I raced outside and saw her blue jumper, sixty metres or so up Swanston Street, so I barrelled across the road and caught up. Tender greetings followed.

‘What a coincidence,' I said. ‘I just looked up at the right time to see you on the escalator in the station.' A puzzled frown crossed her face.

‘I wasn't in the station,' she said.

They can pack a cruel stomach-punch, these kinds of coincidences. They can knock the breath out of you, make you look around for a camera, some cosmic punchline. As I picked off the masking tape around the jigsaw box, I was thinking of the violin and taking it to my man Lewis in Victoria Street for a valuation. But I should have known better, of course. Because what lay inside the box, nestled among the pieces, was a plastic bag of white powder. Don't get me wrong, I've never dabbled, but I'm not stupid. We were talking half a kilo of the hard stuff here.

I put the package down and thought for a while. Thought of the brother who'd gone overseas and left his well-meaning family to their spring-cleaning. Thought about needing seven hundred bucks and kissing goodbye my rent arrears and parking-infringement debts at the same time. Thought about the disguise a god might come in to test my character.

As I sat there I noticed two edge pieces of the jigsaw and pulled them out. Poked around and stuck a few bits of sky together. By the time I'd decided to go and see Lewis, I'd put together the whole top edge and half the skyline.

‘Interested in an old and rare violin, miraculously unearthed at a local flea market?' I asked Lewis, swinging the case in front of him. He came around the counter, wiping his hands.

‘Always interested. Hasn't happened yet, though, so don't hold your breath.'

‘Lewis, I may have something here to restore your faith in miracles.'

He grinned, rubbed his eye. ‘Put it out the back. I'll lock up and buy you a beer.'

Sitting in the pub the words jostled in my mouth, waiting to be aired:
Lewis, how hard would it be to offload half a kilo of heroin?
I drank a mouthful of beer, drowning them. Because I was scared of the answer, to tell you the truth. Scared of Lewis's barking, incredulous laugh and his words that would commit me to the next step.
Easy as this
, Lewis would say, drawing on his smoke, pointing.
See that guy sitting over there?
Then I would be lost.

‘Give us a call about that fiddle,' I said, picking up my keys.

‘No worries. But no promises.'

Back home, I filled in the rest of the skyline, a park and a cathedral. The bag of heroin lay there on the mantelpiece, looking for all the world like a wrapped-up bag of snags for a barbecue. What would old Carl Jung have suggested, I wonder. I didn't have the book, I'd sold it to that guy for three bucks, just to see the pleased light of coincidence dawning on his face.

I filled out the buildings on the jigsaw, sorted the pieces into grass and brick, started working in from the bottom. Stone interlocked with stone, a blur of colour became a floral border in the park. I put on the cricket, and thought about friends who used, friends who were addicted, friends who'd gone into that one-way love affair and were no longer around.

If I hadn't been thinking about Jung, I wouldn't have done it. But I sat there piecing the jigsaw together and it came to me that old Carl actually came from Vienna, and here I was at 2.30 in the morning reconstructing it, and I had to give a smile for the hidden camera when I realised that just one piece was missing, and it was a doorway. I got up and tore a hole in the plastic bag and emptied the heroin down the toilet. I thought of lots of things as I flushed it; money problems mainly, but most of all how suddenly, bone-achingly tired I was. I went to bed and slept without dreaming, and didn't wake up until the phone beat into my head and I picked it up and it was Lewis.

‘I'm just calling about the violin,' he said, and my mouth went dry when I heard the uncharacteristic edge in his voice. ‘Where did you say you picked it up?'

‘Don't joke with me, now, Lewis,' I croaked. ‘I'm skint.'

‘I'm serious. I'm getting a bloke to come and look at it in an hour, but the shop's in a bit of an uproar, let me tell you. Mate, you should take out a ticket in the lottery.'

I gripped the phone. ‘What are you saying? What's the violin worth?'

He laughed. ‘The violin? Nothing, mate. It's a piece of crap. Worth about twenty bucks.'

There was a pause.

‘I'm talking about the bow.'

‘You've lost me.'

‘The bow. The violin bow that came in the case. When I saw the inlay I knew you had something there, but I had to check with the Conservatorium to make sure.' He mentioned a foreign name that sounded like a brand of expensive vodka. ‘What I can't understand is how it ended up at Camberwell market.'

‘What's it worth?' I interrupted him. And I was tensing my stomach, ready for the blow, almost expecting it now.

‘I'd say around $700,' said Lewis.

Later, eating a crumpet and looking down at the city of Vienna, I notice the piece of jigsaw I thought was missing is in fact hidden under the ashtray. I just couldn't see it for looking.

I slide it out and fit it into place, feeling the whole configuration resist, and move slightly out of skew. I move it back with the flat of my hand, feeling it shift. Strengthen. Interlock.

Soundtrack

Rachel is cooking cauliflower cheese when her daughter tells her she has joined a band and they will be practising in the rumpus room starting next Saturday. Rachel leaves off stirring the white sauce and turns to look at her daughter incredulously.

Emma is slumping in the doorway wearing the look of tired defiance she wore the day she got the tattoo. Rachel burst into tears that day, not because the tattoo was bleeding or defacing or even offensive — a Celtic cross surrounding a yin-yang symbol just above her breast — but because she was transported in a moment to a day seventeen years before when she had tickled that plump, powdered body, kissed it noisily just where the yin yang now twisted. Yin and yang, the flux of being: the irony of this is not lost on Rachel, who was a child in the 1960s and by the 1970s hung a batik sarong featuring this very symbol as a curtain in her doorway in the old house in Cardigan Street she shared with seven others. But now she is thirty-eight and grating cheese for dinner, thinking she can live with her daughter's tattoo and even the navel ring and boots, but she has heard the music Emma listens to and does not want it punctuating her Saturdays. Emma is not asking, though; she is informing. Where does a seventeen-year-old get so much certainty?

Rachel feels winded — tossed in front of a camera and told to act, the only person without a script and in someone else's costume. She has been feeling lately, in fact, that her life has a kind of soundtrack. Sometimes she can almost hear it: a melancholy instrumental as she stirs sauce, a frenetic salsa as she runs round in the morning like a cartoon, clashing foreboding cymbals as her daughter drops a bombshell. Soundtrack when she finds the battery in the Datsun is flat and hits her head dully, theatrically, on the steering wheel. Soundtrack as she stares at her reflection in the bathroom. The film and the score of the film that seem to compose the key scenes of her life are driving her crazy.

Mirror shot
, something authoritative says in her head as she scrutinises the lines under her eyes before she goes to bed.
Pan around as she touches her face and reaches for moisturiser and … cut
. There is a kind of a Richard Clayderman piano number swelling in the background. The scene spins, fades, some audience somewhere applauds, some director is a contender for an award.

Now, as she grates, she tries to stem the tide rattling away in her head, describing her movements shot by shot, she tries to actually clear a space to think, to put her case to Emma. But the babbling continues:
Close-up as she grates. Cut to her face struggling with emotion. Cue soundtrack, cello solo.

Rachel's mouth opens and closes, as if waiting for its lines. She is losing the trick of improvisation. She grates the cheese down to a nub as Emma tells her there are only four people in the band and that they are called Melting Carpet. Rachel, with a large, disassociated part of her brain, musing like a bewildered spectator, wonders if the problem is television.

Rachel's husband Jerry still sports the ponytail he wore to Sunbury '74, and he is still a sweet man who wants a Harley. When Emma's friends come over, he often tells them he once played blues harmonica with Max Merritt and the Meteors. Jerry thinks the group may have had a revival recently, like so many other bands of his era. He lets Emma's friends play his Jimi Hendrix LPs, eagerly showing them how to lower the stylus. Rachel, watching, can't believe that fate has bounced like this and they like Jimi Hendrix. She can't believe she lives in a world where her own child doesn't know how to play a record.
Everything
, Rachel thinks,
is going too fast
. On bad days she looks askance at Jerry and Emma together, wonders if they could perhaps have been sent from a casting agency, derides the big clumsy strokes this script seems to be written in and contemplates what might yet be getting drowned out in the noise.
'Scuse me
, she drones to herself,
while I kiss this guy
.

Jerry had wanted Emma to be a home birth, in their large, airy bedroom in Warburton. He would have received her into his big hands saying ‘Unbelievable' and ‘This is blowing me away'. He would have wrapped her in the sarong with the yin and yang symbol, pulled from the door and given a quick shake. He would have had Brian Eno on the stereo, thinks Rachel. Back then, that would have been the soundtrack. She hesitates, remembering the hospital birth, Jerry indignantly telling the nurses that they weren't wrapping his daughter in alfoil, no way. What had the cleaners been singing as they hauled the industrial polishers up and down those corridors outside her room? Streisand oozing that she was a woman in love. Rachel, her world collapsed into baby adoration, had absorbed all those lyrics as if by osmosis, and agreed.