The Slipping Place Read online

  Veronica looked up. She went to the end of the house where she could see the front lawn, the flowerbeds, the driveway. She looked down at the stone wall in grainy shadow. The bottom gate was closed. There was no-one in the garden.

  Chapter 3

  ______

  The main bar of the Beaufort Hotel had brown walls, black-painted tables, square black stools and dirty yellowish light. In an area at the back Veronica could see one bitter-white spotlight, flashing meaninglessly into a corner. The place seemed to be empty, except for a table near the front window, where four young people sat slumped together. The barman was very young, dressed in a tight denim jacket with a white scarf wound several times around his neck, the fringed end at the front. As Veronica came in he turned away and started moving bottles around.

  One of the stools had been pushed into the centre of the floor. On it, beside a ring of liquid that caught the light, there was a glass with a short black straw. She picked it up and took it to the bar. This was a mistake. The barman read it as a criticism. He smirked at her, slitting his eyes.

  Somewhere there was music, a hard, grating sound with no echo. It wasn’t tuneful, not even quite sound, more like something she felt, as if there was a creature scratching at the ceiling. Georgie had been right. Veronica didn’t belong here and she was probably not going to learn anything. But she could try.

  ‘I wonder if you can help me.’

  He had a sharp face, and a kind of unconscious fragility. In the metallic light over the bar she could see a hint of hair above the top lip.

  ‘I’m looking for my son.’

  He hissed weakly, which was meant to be a laugh. His gaze slipped to the empty room. Then he looked behind him, as if seeking help from someone who wasn’t there.

  ‘He was in here yesterday evening. His name is Roland Cruikshank. He’s tall and athletic looking, and he would have been dressed like a surfer, with an old jumper and a beaded leather thing around his neck. Wild hair, tangled, with blondey ends.’

  She was practised at this. She had had to describe Roland before and his appearance hadn’t changed. But this time the list of attributes seemed only to emphasise his absence. She wished she’d brought a photo.

  The barman picked up the glass and moved it to a lower bench where the light showed its smears. The bar was red, faded and stained, with spots of waxy black.

  ‘He likes drawing.’ That sounded ridiculous, like the proud mother of a four-year-old.

  But it brought a flicker of recognition. ‘There was a guy in here last night. He left a drawing on the table. Jilly picked it up and she reckoned he was a real artist. She was going to put it up somewhere.’

  Veronica looked around the dingy room.

  ‘It’s here.’ He turned to a low shelf, found a piece of paper and put it in front of her. It was a page torn from a paperback, a few lines of print and a drawing.

  It was Roland’s. In all of his work, through all its changes, his style was instantly recognisable. This was a drawing of a girl, done with a sharp pencil and then smudged with a rubber, the way he did them years ago. The girl’s eyes were focused on the viewer with a kind of insistent intimacy. One hand was lifted, as if she was trying to reach out of the picture.

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s him.’

  He still had his hand on the drawing and didn’t offer to give it to her. ‘He’s your son?’

  Yes. Her son. Veronica looked at the drawing. Roland drew fine lines and then blurred them, maybe hoping that the truth would turn up in the spaces, the shadows. He was struggling with the same problems she was, trying to catch something on a page and finding that it couldn’t be caught.

  She said, ‘I need to find him.’

  ‘Yeah. You really do.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘They reckon he was in a bad way. Sounds as if he was on something.’

  No. Roland, no. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’

  ‘He was with some old woman, some old drunk that comes here.

  He wanted to get her a drink, but Curtis kicked them out. They were both …’ Instead of finding a word he pushed some air out of his mouth and shook his head.

  There was a burst of wild laughter from the young people in the corner. One of them grabbed at something in another’s hands and stood up, kicking his chair over. Then they all sat down.

  The barman said, ‘Has he got a kid?’

  ‘A what? No. Why?’

  ‘I think he said something about a little kid. Curtis said some people shouldn’t be allowed to be parents.’

  ‘Roland definitely doesn’t have a child.’

  ‘Just as well.’ He had lowered the drawing towards the shelf behind the bar. One corner went into a wet patch. Moisture crept across it. ‘So, yeah. I hope you find him.’

  He was looking at her more closely now, intrigued that she could be the mother of such a son, wondering what she was going to say about it. His eyes were lined in kohl, which suited him. He had that delicacy you saw sometimes, the kind of beauty that transcended crassness, like that pop singer from years ago, in the poster on Libby’s wall.

  She wanted to ask if Roland had a bruise, but couldn’t bring herself to mention it. ‘I don’t suppose he said where he was staying?’

  ‘I wasn’t on. I’m just saying what I was told.’ He was watching her, storing up details to tell later, a small story from a slow Monday.

  ‘Who was on? Can I see him?’

  ‘Gary and Curtis. Curtis is coming in at five o’clock.’

  ‘Can I ring him?’

  There was a tiny grimace and a head wobble. She felt suddenly very sad, at the pettiness, the mean self-centredness of him. She had to remind herself this was a child, caught up in his silly world, with his posturing, his eyeliner. He didn’t know how life could be.

  ‘The woman who was with Roland, do you know anything about her?’

  Now he was able to help. He leaned forward, looking pleased. ‘She’s an alcoholic. And mental. She comes and tries to get a pie but we chuck her out. She’s bad news. Always yelling and stuff, doing these long mad rants.’

  ‘And where does she live?’

  ‘She got upset with Curtis and threw a book at him and the guy … your son … he kind of grabbed her and he was like “Oh, if you calm down I’ll get you something at the shop and drive you home.” Curtis reckoned with any luck he’d go for DUI and get taken off the streets.’ He grimaced again. ‘Sorry.’

  The music had a different sound now, voices maybe, tightened into wordless electronic beeps. ‘That’s all right,’ said Veronica. ‘He probably had a point.’

  He studied her face for signs of emotion, licked the thin lips. ‘It’d be worth checking with the police.’

  ‘You don’t know where she lives, this woman?’

  ‘Gary reckons she used to have a bookshop. So that’s no help.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There aren’t any bookshops anymore, are there? There aren’t even any DVD shops. Only one.’

  ‘What about the book?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said she threw a book. At your friend.’

  ‘Curtis.’

  ‘Have you got that?’

  He blinked at her for a moment, frowning as if they’d never understand each other. Then he swung away, went out through a door and came back almost immediately with a wastepaper basket, which he put on the bar in front of her. Veronica tipped it to look inside. The book was under some cellophane. She took it out – a paperback, the cover worn to softness and dog-eared. Oliver Twist. There was a stamp on the first page.

  Josette LeFevre

  Holborn Books

  Purchase Price … Return Price …

  No prices filled in.

  340 Macquarie Street, South Hobart.

  He said, ‘People like that, terrible things happen to them and then they blame everyone else and then they hit the grog or something worse.’

  ‘People like what?’

  But
he had turned his back.

  Chapter 4

  ______

  A Georgian building, 340 Macquarie Street was on an intersection, built right up to both footpaths, with the door across the corner. It had two storeys of soft apricot brick, a low roof and twelve-paned windows on the upper floor. At street level there were larger shopfront windows but these were blocked inside with backless bookshelves. There was nothing to see but books – not the spines, the raw edges of pages, pressed together into an impenetrable wall. Beside the door there was a hanging sign with a painting of Dickensian London, crooked buildings and a carriage, and the words Newman Noggs Books. The name had been changed since the copy of Oliver Twist was stamped.

  Veronica shook her head and muttered to herself, ‘Bookshops.’

  Sometime during his Year 12, Roland had taken to visiting a second-hand bookshop. That one had been over a barber’s in Elizabeth Street. He had spent hours there with the couple who owned it, drinking port and smoking pot, thinking with eighteen-year-old naivety that his parents didn’t know. Typical Roland. Even his adolescent rebellion had to be bizarre, the drugs and booze confused with an unhealthy obsession with reading. She had a sudden picture of his bedroom: crowded shelves, boxes of stale paperbacks, drawings everywhere. And now it appeared he was involved with another squalid bookshop.

  She had dropped into that bookshop once. The couple had seemed a bit vague, but harmless enough. The man had been French and the woman Australian, but with a French name. She looked inside Oliver Twist again. Josette le Fevre? Was that the name?

  Macquarie Street was busy. A truck rattled past, pushing some exhaust her way. She watched it go uphill away from town. Ahead of it, seeming to block off the road, was the mountain. Wellington. Kunanyi. It looked very close, vertical and purple-black, a large dark wall. As a child she had understood that the world must end there, that there could be no path through.

  The backyard of the shop was hidden by a high paling fence and the gate was closed but from the door of the shop, looking down the steep side street, she could see over the fence into a corner of the yard. There was a car there. She could only see part of its roof: a small car, powdery blue. It looked like Paul’s old Honda Jazz. Paul had lent Roland that car before.

  There was something sticky-taped to the shop’s door. Another page torn from a paperback, with another of Roland’s sketches. Not a face this time, just a hand. So, yes, he was here, or had been. He was behaving secretively and strangely. Just as he had in his adolescence. She took the page down and opened the door.

  Overhead there was a bell on a bent stalk, but it had lost its donger and made only a dead clanking sound. Inside, because of the blocked windows, the shop was almost completely dark. Near the door, a set of shelves blocked the rest of the shop from view. It held books of all kinds – gold-embossed encyclopedias, hard-backs in linen and faded paper covers, orange Penguin spines, tattered paperbacks. She stepped around it and into the gloom. More shelves here, close together, chaotically arranged and stuffed full. It was impossible to make out the internal walls. There were books stacked vertically, with more crammed horizontally on top of them; books lying on top of the shelves, in places stacked as high as the ceiling; books in boxes on the floor; and glass cases at the ends of rows, all full. And it wasn’t just books. There were pictures everywhere, prints and posters, photographs, some in frames. They were stuck on the ends of shelves or pinned on the front of them, over the books. Some were pegged to strings and strung across the room.

  Veronica stood where she was and shouted. ‘Roland?’

  The shop had a breathless feeling, the smell that all these places have: a combination of old carpets, dry dust, and silverfish. There was some light coming through the front door, and a few bright cracks around the books in the windows, but this penetrated only a short distance, serving not so much to illuminate the room as to darken it by contrast.

  ‘Roland?’

  In the middle of the room was a counter of scratched wood, with two posters on the front: a Miró, and an advertisement for calvados, a girl in a bathing suit. A green glass lamp threw a ball of dim light but this was confined to the desk. She looked for a bell, put her fingers on the counter, felt something sticky and lifted them again.

  Further back in the room was more dull light, coming from a standard lamp with a yellowish shade. And possibly a movement. An almost imperceptible shift in two shades of grey.

  ‘Hello?’ She had produced a high middle-aged voice, something from a pantomime dowager, nervous and silly. The room, all the waiting paper, sucked the sound away.

  Someone said, ‘See or shut your eyes … ’Tis the Last Judgement’s fire must cure this place.’

  Behind the calico lamp, out of reach of its light, there was a lump of intensified darkness. Veronica moved forwards. Now she could see the folds of a garment, a piece of pale wrist. It was a woman. She didn’t want to be seen. The lamplight was being used as a screen, requiring visitors to come into the depths of the shop before they knew she was there.

  What had she said? There was something familiar about it. ‘I’m looking for Roland Cruikshank.’

  The figure had risen lightly from her chair. Under a shapeless shift, she looked thin, fragile. She took a step, staggered, then fell sideways, turning and coming to rest with her back against the bookshelves on the wall. Now her body was in the lamplight. In one hand she had a glass with a tiny amount of golden liquid. The shift was of crushed velvet the colour of plums, a dress from the 1960s or early 1970s. Over it she had a chunky necklace, blocks of purple plastic and brass rings.

  Was this the woman Roland had spent time with in Year 12? She couldn’t see the woman’s face. And now she had forgotten the name stamped in Oliver Twist. Odette something. Not Odette. That wasn’t right.

  ‘Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim gaping at death …’

  A theatrical wave of the hand. A performance in a hoarse voice. Veronica breathed in some of the papery air and hardened her lips. ‘I’m looking for my son.’

  ‘… and dies while it recoils.’

  ‘Roland Cruikshank. You were with him last night at the Beaufort Hotel.’

  The glass moved; a tiny gesture.

  It must be the same woman. Roland’s old friend from his school days. ‘What’s he doing in Hobart? How long has he been here?’

  Sandrine? Juliette? If she could just remember the name, it would help, give her some authority, some kind of foothold. ‘I remember you. I know you know him.’

  The glass moved again, the liquid sliding around. ‘Roland, like all of us, is unknowable.’

  Somewhere in the room there was a swelling of light. A door opened and quietly closed.

  ‘Never mind.’ Veronica went towards the sound. She pushed into the nearest space, charged forwards blindly, turned, and kept turning until she found a door.

  ‘Roland?’

  She went across a hallway, past a flight of stairs and down a corridor, narrowed by more shelves. There was a sitting room on the right, with a person she didn’t know. She went past it, to a tiny kitchen with windows above the bench, showing a shabby verandah, wooden steps and, well below, a rubbishy yard. The gate was open, the car gone.

  She went back to the sitting room and stood in the doorway. This room was also book lined and not much lighter than the front. The person in there was a young mother. She was sitting on an armchair, beside a child in a pram, head bent over her hands, as if she was praying.

  Veronica said, ‘I’m looking for my son. Have you seen a young man?’

  The woman stood up and came forwards, pushing the pram in front of her. She wasn’t well. Her long hair was lank and sticky, a lifeless dark blonde. She came close to Veronica, as if she was about to say something, then shoved the pram forwards. ‘Mason.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘This is Mason.’

  Veronica looked at the child, pulled her head slightly back and said, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Mayso
n. With a y.’

  What? Mason? How could there be a y? ‘Where?’

  ‘What?’

  It was a reading room – three cherry-red armchairs, a lamp over each, a window overlooking the side street, and books on all the walls. It was a friendly room, crowded with texture and warm colour. At one end, above a fireplace, there was a print of a modernist painting, a stylised desert in pastels, possibly Paul Klee, and beside that a cardboard notice:

  No Surliness, No Smelliness.

  This means you, Wocka Scott.

  Only one person asleep at a time.

  Management.

  Veronica’s focus was drawn to something familiar. A table in the corner was scattered with paper and fusain pencils. She went over there. They were mostly blank sheets, some with a few hasty lines, dashed off and abandoned, and some sketches. Roland’s. Roland had been here, drawing. There was a pile of paperbacks: The Moonstone, Silas Marner, Frankenstein, Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

  The room was very quiet, the sound of traffic muffled by the bulk of all the books. More than quiet – it felt as if the air had thinned. Veronica had a sudden irrational sense of empty space, as if Roland had been plucked out, leaving a vacuum where he should have been. From the front rooms she heard the old woman cough.

  She repeated herself: ‘I’m looking for my son. His name is Roland. He’s been here, drawing. These are his.’

  The young woman’s face was thin, the skin dull, too white in places, too brown in others, a dragged-down look around the mouth. She wore a lot of eyeliner, which made her eyes look flat, like shapes drawn on a page.

  ‘Do you know where he might be?’

  ‘Look at him.’ The young woman leaned over the back of the pram and lifted her boy’s hair. The boy slept on. There was a lump on his forehead, a cool violet and blue bruise with a red slit down the middle.

  ‘Oh,’ said Veronica. ‘That’s nasty.’ She was sounding stupid. But she couldn’t think about this child now.

  The woman said, ‘Roland knows about it. Ask Roland.’

  So she’d picked up on the name. Now she was using it for her own ends, to persuade Veronica to help her. She was more cunning than she looked.