Five Bells (22 page)

‘Name and address?'

‘Don't you want me to come in?'

‘Name and address? I'll take your details, luv, and we'll send a police car to pick you up. Right away. OK? Ten minutes or so.'

Catherine left her name and address and then the policeman hung up.

She was shaken by what seemed the dark undertow of the day, a child lost, perhaps a death, and nothing was noticed. There was just this imprecise still from a lazy camera, this unremembered coming together of four visitors to the quay, ordinary people like her, with their own purpose in being there and their own hidden histories.

Brendan would have liked this
. Brendan would have seen the drama in being caught unawares adjacent to criminal intent. He would have found thrilling the accident of her appearance and the coalition of unknown faces, the preposterous coincidence, the terrible forces beneath the everyday suggested in this naff red outlining of passing faces. Faces that shared, inadvertently, in something unknown.

But it could be nothing, she told herself. The story was incomplete. Images told you nothing. That was why she was a journalist, why she loved but finally distrusted Henry Jones Thaddeus, why she was moved, but remained ignorant, looking at the Aboriginal dot paintings, why she wanted to get behind the image of the car with blood spatter on the front seat to the still-alive body of Veronica Guerin, to the woman before the blood, and before the police, and before the journalist herself was the story. But the red-ringed heads in a photograph were perhaps the beginning of an explanation.

 

When two policemen knocked on the door Catherine leapt to attention. They were uniformed and young. The taller one, poorly shaven, with a small nick on his chin, held up a card as they do on television, and the other, vaguely handsome, was already turning back towards the elevator. They descended together in the brown light, standing too close to each other, and at the ping of the lift door Catherine saw the police car parked directly in front, brazen and bright in a no-parking zone. All she could think of was that she wished she had changed her clothes; her indigo sundress and open sandals were an offence to the gravity of their errand.

‘Here on a holiday, luv?' The tall one had noticed her accent.

‘Working. Just arrived.'

‘So what do you think, eh? God's own country or what?'

Catherine was taken aback by this casual chit-chat. Australian men were always seeking forms of verbal confirmation.

‘It's lovely,' she said weakly, sounding more foreign than ever, and all the time she was thinking: the little girl might be drifting in the harbour, eyes closed, face down. She might be turning slowly in the currents, her plaits waving like sea life, her tiny lungs, oh bless her, flooded with cold water,
and her poor mam somewhere out there, completely distraught.

The indecency of small talk irritated and pained her.

 

Central Sydney flashed by. A flow of lights, barium, sodium and fluorescent, then deceleration. Workers in reflecting, lime-coloured vests attended a rough hole and a mound of rubble by the roadside. Sad bastards, road-working on a Saturday night. Their faces zipped by, dazed, then fell away into darkness. Orange traffic cones surrounded them, like an artless installation.

There were white taxis everywhere, and crowds jerking on the pavement, intermittently merging, or separating, or lit by pulses of headlight. Every large city is lurid on a Saturday night, Catherine told herself. Flashy, heartless, swaggering, cocksure. Every large city has its adrenaline overdrive and its regions of darkness, where one might be lost, or found, or entirely disappear.

 

In the reception area of the police station Catherine was told to wait a few minutes. Night settled around her. She sat on a sticky vinyl chair staring at a missing persons' poster. Squares of blurry faces in rows, six by six. Thirty-six missing people. The poster was mounted on a pale blue wall and Catherine leant forward in the jaundiced light the better to examine it, as if convinced she might see there someone she knew. She became aware of the policewoman behind the reception counter watching her with disdain. A bit like her oldest sister, Philomena, sharp-faced and mousey. The low wattage illumination flattered no one. When at last she was asked questions in the interview room – regulation grey, denuded of features but for a distracting crack in the wall above the door – there was really nothing of worth or substance to say. She disap
pointed the two detectives. No, she had not seen the man and child on the train. No, she could remember nothing at all unusual. She saw them when they alighted. They looked like father and daughter. Unremarkable. Quiet. No, she couldn't say which direction they took. No, she didn't notice anything, really.

But Catherine had. There had been something, something that called forth within her a momentary and ineffable tenderness. What was it, then, that the child had evoked?

And yes, if she thought of anything further she would get in touch.

It was a pointless excursion. The detectives were courteous, but bored. Why had they bothered to bring her in? She had been mildly excited at first, thinking herself a special witness, able to help solve a mystery; now she felt like the schoolkid ashamed because she had raised her hand with eager confidence and had no answers. It was nothing like television. There was no resolution and no plot.

 

When Catherine left the interview room she saw before her the Chinese woman who was also caught in the CCTV image. She was short, well dressed, and still carrying her bulky handbag. She sat where Catherine had earlier sat, and was examining the thirty-six missing persons photographs. Catherine sat beside her. The thirty-six faces looked oddly similar, an under-nourished, pale tribe. They were mostly young. Didn't the old go missing? Did police only search for the missing young?

‘I saw you today,' she said. ‘At Kurraba Point Wharf.'

‘Yes.'

‘You waved.'

‘Yes.' The Chinese woman smiled. ‘She's safe, you know, that little girl. She is safe.'

Catherine sat beside the woman. They stared in the same direction.

‘She was happy, not afraid.'

‘Pardon?' The accent was unusual.

‘She was happy, not afraid.'

‘Ah,' said Catherine. ‘I didn't really notice.'

The Chinese woman touched her hand. The fabric of her dress was shiny, Catherine noticed,
oriental
perhaps, and covered with small mauve buds of cherry blossom.

‘Safe,' she said again.

 

Catherine's name was called. A taxi had arrived to take her back to the apartment. It seemed too soon. She wanted to speak to the Chinese woman who had mysteriously intersected her path three times – three times – in a single day. She leant forward and kissed the woman's cheek, then embarrassed, emotionally fumbling, Catherine turned and stood. Had they been elsewhere she might have stroked the woman's hair or laid her face in her lap; this woman inspired solicitude, this woman had the composure of one who knew the pertinence of details, the solution to crimes, the way the future might ripple from a touch or a single word.

‘Well, good luck,' Catherine announced. She had no idea why she said this. A formula saying. The Chinese woman raised her hand in a small precise wave. Behind the counter the Philomena look-alike made a sniffing, dismissive sound. On her high horse, as Mam would say. As you do.
Lady Muck.

How inconsequential it felt, all this coming and going. It was maddening to be implicated, as though there was a mystery to the day, then to have the possibility of significance rendered trite and officious, a kind of bureaucratic trans action, a woman picking at her teeth in bad light behind a distant high counter.
In the half-lit apartment Catherine felt lost. She paused in the bathroom, looked in the mirror while she rinsed her hands, then pulled back from her own image, which appeared weary and aged. She scooped water for her face, splashed it, and looked again. No improvement. She lifted her hair from her neck, fanning it. Catherine could not help feeling a vague prickling of panic. She was in Australia and it was not all sparkles and sunshine.
Remorseless
: the word surfaced. It was surprising to think again of Veronica Guerin, after all these years. Might there be
remorseless
crime in this country? Catherine patted her face dry. Held it in the towel, smothered. She closed her eyes into an awful solitude, which suddenly felt unendurable.

When Catherine walked into the living room she glanced at the clock and decided that it was time to ring Luc. She would not, resolutely not, tell him of the supposed abduction, but must talk of her job, and the fine weather and their tentative future. Would he join her here in Sydney? Would she be able to persuade him?

 

Catherine dialled and heard the phone ringing into the chamber of Luc's sleeping, on the other, now-awakening side of the planet. He took a while to pick up. She wondered if he was hushing another woman resting beside him, or if there was just this unbreachable gap, this global distance a single voice might never quite cover. Catherine, close to tears but determined to be chatty, held the receiver to her face and waited.

‘Oui?'

Hearken.
It was his half-asleep voice, his mother tongue, in which the wisp of himself as a boy, afraid of his grandmother and of moths, was still touchingly apparent.

‘Sorry. I just wanted to hear your voice.'

And when they had talked Catherine finished the bottle of wine. And when neither had said what the other could not bear to hear, she had turned out the light. And when in darkness the little girl reappeared before her, shining in photographic silver, televisually fallible, a relic of herself and possibly now dead, Catherine tried to turn away, pretending she didn't care, into the tunnel of sleep, that sweetest regression.

But she lay in the dark and what came to her wakeful imagining was this: an altar boy swinging a censer and smoke filling the transept of the church, and her mother's face, and Brendan's, peering half disappeared through the cloudy air, and the godless and the god-fearing all together in one place, and the mystery of any family, and its assorted pieties and devotions. Any family, anywhere, its assorted devotions. Any child. Or that child, that lost, particular child.

Pei Xing rode the ferry back to Circular Quay thinking of her husband, Wang Xun. She recollected his hands, his eyes, the timbre of his voice. The shape of his back and his buttocks, and the touch they invited. There was a form of memory, yes, that resided in the cells of the body.

They were married for seven years before he succumbed to the tuberculosis that he contracted in the north; and these were her years of recovering a self. She had been effaced in the prison, but for a concealed, dim life, lived almost entirely in foreign vocabularies; and then again in the labour camp, where she learnt how physical exhaustion might wear a woman to a mere shape. This was how she had seen herself, as hopeless, insubstantial.

When Xun arrived, Pei Xing had not understood at first what it was he was offering her. She had closed down so much,
and was so wholly dispirited. She was a woman composed of vacant spaces. But the first time he held her face in his hands, tilted it to look at him, leant to kiss, she discovered a flourish of inner liveliness and a remnant of self undemolished. They sought permission to marry and had to wait a year; there were many political impediments, given her family's ‘crimes'. But Xun's father loved his only son and knew of his illness, and so was persuaded to make an intervention in Shanghai. They were authorised both to marry and to return to the city.

With four other families Xun and Pei Xing shared a house near Suzhou Creek and lived in one tiny room, with a communal kitchen and latrine. It was a kind of liberty neither had dared to anticipate. They woke in each other's company. They ate together, just the two of them. They had private, intense, searching conversations. The rapture of sexual experience was also unexpected. Pei Xing could hardly speak of it, even when they lay in each other's arms. Both learnt not to make too much noise in their love-making and the quiet time afterwards was eloquent enough. Pei Xing had been surprised to discover how warm a human body was, and how the need of love-making brought its own climate to their bed. And she was surprised to be reminded of the existence of laughter, that there was another faculty forgotten and a body pleasure neglected. There were the tremendous histories of nations, and the vast movements of peoples, there were collective orders of brutality and the crushing of those deemed dissidents; and there were also these more subtle and modest measures of life, the preparation of a meal, a whispered conversation, a suggestive kiss. When Pei Xing discovered her pregnancy there was more rejoicing: his face at her belly, listening to the third life growing between them.