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Peter Corris: The Other Side of Sorrow

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Peter Corris The Other Side of Sorrow

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I drove home and picked up the slightly damp mail from the slightly leaky letterbox. Although I hadn’t seen it for so long I recognised Cyn’s handwriting on one of the letters. There was no mistaking that precise backhand. I ripped it open and swore when I saw that as well as a note it contained a cheque for $3000. The cheque fell to the floor as I read the note:

Dear Cliff Don’t be offended. I know this business won’t be easy for you, but I want you to treat it as a job as much as you can. I know you’re good at your job and that you love it. I hated it as you know, but that’s ancient history. Please do your very best. You never know, we might have done something right after all.

My first impulse was to tear up the cheque but I resisted it. A private enquiry agent needs a client to validate his activities and there’s no better validation than money. The rules state that there should be a signed contract as well, but who ever heard of a game where everyone played by the rules? I put the cheque away in my wallet. When I got to the office I’d open a file labelled ‘Samuels’ and put the cheque and the note and a copy of the photograph of Eve in it.

Waiting for the call from the RTA, I made coffee and sat looking out at the rain and trying to find other explanations for the woman who was watching Cyn, or other identities for her. Both my parents were only children so there were no first cousins resembling Eve or myself to consider. I was as sure as any man who’d led a reasonably active sex life can be that I’d fathered no children. The question was – had Eve ever had an illegitimate child? I thought it highly unlikely. As a teenager Eve entered a god-bothering phase that lasted until she went to university at the age of twenty-two. She was evangelical and puritanical until she plunged into left-wing politics in her first year. She married Luke, a fellow radical, in her second year and they had the first of their two sons within a year of that. I’d found Eve the Christian pretty hard to take, but I’d kept in touch with her. I saw more of her after she swapped the Bible for Gramsci. I didn’t take Gramsci on board any more than I had the Bible, but it made her easier to make fun of. I couldn’t see where Eve could’ve squeezed in a kid.

A doppelganger? Sure, they exist, but why would my sister’s doppelganger be watching my ex-wife? The world is crazy, but not that crazy.

The call came through as I was contemplating making a second pot of coffee as a way of heading off the impulse to have a drink. Like many people in this suspicious age, I tend to use the answering machine to screen calls, but this time I picked up.

‘Xerox and bingo, Cliff.’

This meant that the call was unmonitored and that the vehicle wasn’t registered to some subsidiary of some other string of companies that would make the enquiry amount to a paper chase.

‘Tell me.’

‘Damien Talbot, unit 3, number 12, George Avenue, Homebush. Age twenty-six. The vehicle was purchased a year ago for two thousand five hundred dollars from a dealer in Homebush. Must be a bomb.’

I grunted. ‘Anything else?’

‘Your meter’s ticking.’

‘Remember ICAC.’

‘Fuck ICAC. Yep, our Damien has a shitload of unpaid parking tickets out on him, plus an unroadworthy citation. As we speak, being followed up by the boys and girls in blue.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Up yours. Good punting.’

This was a reference to the method of payment – a deposit in her TAB account. I hung up and studied my notes. I doubted that Cyn would like what I’d turned up so far, particularly the location. Cyn used to regard Leichhardt as the western suburbs and so beneath contempt.

Homebush was much further west.

I’d never spent much time in Homebush, had hardly ever been out there. Despite the attractive name, as far as I knew – and a quick check of an old Gregory’s confirmed it – the place was a bit of a wasteland. Homebush Bay was muddy and mangrove-ringed; there was a brickworks, an abattoir and a huge rubbish dump in the middle of some secondary-growth bushland. The Flemington saleyards were nearby and it was said that escaped pigs from the saleyards had gone feral on the dump and in the bush and were a risk to life and limb. For many years the pub on Parramatta Road, adjacent to the saleyards, was known as the Sheep Shit Inn.

George Avenue was a short street running uphill. From the top there would once have been a view across the bush towards the dam and what lay beyond, now the view was of hundreds of hectares of development for the Olympic Games. Brand new roads with pristine kerb and guttering gleaming in the rain; towering steel and cement structures resembling, at distance, the Pompidou Centre; massive earthmoving equipment reshaping the terrain; kilometres of orange tape and temporary barriers; vast tracts of bare earth and not a blade of grass in sight. Here and there the past had been preserved. The dam still existed and what looked like the brickworks. Some trees remained, but there was nowhere for a feral pig to hide. Despite the heavy rain the work was still going on. Bulldozers and backhoes were moving and cranes were swinging their loads.

I turned my attention to the undistinguished block of cream-brick flats at number 12. A three-storey 1950s job and showing its age, with rust stains around the drainpipes and moss in the mortar. These days we forget that most people didn’t have cars in the ‘50s and blocks of flats like these made little provision for them. It looked as if there was space for three or four cars at most, the rest would have to park in the street. I wasn’t surprised that the psychedelic van wasn’t in evidence – enquiries are rarely that easy. There were twelve letter boxes and the junk mail sticking out of number 3 wasn’t a promising sign.

Security was non-existent – the ‘50s again – and I walked in the front door, located unit 3 at the back and knocked loudly. Nothing. I pressed my ear to the door but got none of the noises of occupation – voices, radio, TV, vacuum cleaner – just the silence that means empty. The lock was pickable but it was a bit early in the proceedings for that. I knocked at number 4 opposite. No response. Likewise at number 2, but the door of number 1 swung open so quickly that I guessed the occupant had been waiting for me. A looker-outer of windows, an ear to the ground type. That could be good.

She was somewhere between middle-aged and older and trying hard to stay on the right side of the divide. She was medium tall, heavily built but holding it well, with considerable undergarment help, in a short, tight skirt and snug-fitting, ribbed, rollneck sweater. She was expertly made up, her hair was attractively arranged and the way she leaned against the door jamb suggested that standing in doorways wasn’t new to her.

‘I thought you might be here for me,’ she said. ‘But even the shy ones don’t knock on all the other doors first.’

Her broad smile invited me to smile in turn. ‘Not today, I’m afraid, I’d like to talk to you, though.’

‘Cop?’

I shook my head and showed her my licence.

‘Cop,’ she said. She glanced at her watch. ‘Well, I guess my 3.30’s not coming. I can spare you some time. We can see how we go. Come in, Clifford.’

I winced at the name, but it was encouraging that she was a quick study. Stepping into her flat from the shabby passage was like moving from economy up to business class. The room was tastefully and unfussily furnished with just enough touches – velvet cushions, Balinese-looking wall hangings, a waft of incense – to suggest that things could get interesting further inside.

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