Jack Cox - Dodge Rose

She spun on her heel and kicked something.

Respect said a man standing in the shade beside her. He wore his ponytail hooked through the clasp of a sweat streaked baseball cap and carried a bundle of newspapers under one arm. With the other he was pointing at the big iron gate still ruckling from the blow. Eliza frowned. I need to get to Kings Cross.

You have to go the other way.

She nodded. I’m not from around here.

The man was taller than Eliza and held himself so rigid that to look at her his eyeballs rolled down in his face like a pair of lead sinkers. The quickest way is through the gardens he said. I’m going through to Bourke Street, I can give you directions from there. She thanked him and followed him through the gateway. He did not ask her what her business was in Sydney, his long legs quietly swallowing up the ground before her. She wanted to know what place they were in. He told her they were in the Palace Gardens. Where was the palace.

Here he said. It ran more than two hundred metres this way and that way. He began to tell her about it because Eliza had returned him, helplessly, a blank look. A glass and wood and corrugated iron monument to trade and industry and shop and housekeeping. A dome rose in the middle as high as five stories. The architect had worked for the English greenhouse expert whatshisname, Paxton, who drew from the example of a giant water lily the load bearing beams of the Crystal Palace in London. The building here burned down one night and the land reverted to the gardens. There is a sunken pavement where the dome used to be and a bronze cupid in the centre whose eyes are covered in fruit bat crap, his face turned up in glee or wonder to where that ceiling imploded and fell five stories in a bloom of galactic cinders. A plaque beneath his feet says love lead them. Always wondered what the hell that means.

As they walked the man had folded the newspapers behind his back and Eliza, seeing how brittle they were and hatched with creases, scanned between his fingers for a date. They came to a flight of steps and stayed there. That must have been a long time ago.

One hundred years.

O said Eliza. The hours spent on the train had wrung her out. A line of tourists walked between them and down into the lower gardens, their voices echoing back on the steps. Eliza brushed against a statue of winter holding a dead sparrow in his hand, little left to divine, not once I’m through with my lapidations, if I have anything to do with it. The plinth for spring stood empty. How did the palace burn down.

Some say arson. After the exhibition was removed it became quite a volatile species of miscellanea. Lots of apparently innocuous objects were kept on display in the wings and places, including the complete collection of the Linnaean Society library, but the basement was turned into a store for government records. Land deeds, the census. The 1888 census went up in smoke, so they say it was arson. To get rid of the stain you know. You go up and back and the family is begun in bondage. Could be a speculator on Macquarie Street just wanted to clear the view. He shielded his eyes and looked out across the harbour. Boats were scattered around like rice. A million dollars muttered the man in the baseball cap, and rolled his papers into an iron scroll. Eliza stretched until her shoulders cracked. That is a lot, she said, of useless water.

From the farther side of the gardens he pointed her up William Street to the Cross, and so she went along that concrete geodetic and alone wove under the pale neon rain of the strip clubs towards the address I’d cobbled together a week before over Dodge’s ancient, fractured stationery. It was after midday and people had thrown their jackets over their shoulders and come onto the street with empty stomachs, cockeyed with the cords of forgotten ways, relics of a senile stage, bed to the river of the living. The street, it got away from me. Those were the days. Who were they all these people. Eliza might have ended up lost again but she had been watching a sailor flit like desire through the crowd ahead of her when he turned a corner and where he disappeared she read the name of Greenknowe Avenue in bright letters.

The latticework of pipes running up one side of the building was, when she saw it, burgeoning with rust, the brass panels of the street door as encrusted and clouded as a high water mark. Since a stopper had been lodged between them Eliza pushed through to the lobby without buzzing the flat. Her foot caught the stopper and the daylight snapped shut behind her. She blinked uselessly. In a gloom where the glass torches of four electric angels had raised as many overlapping moons along the wallpaper she could make out the silhouette of a staircase, a narrow pot plant and nothing else. Her fingers groped along the wall until the pressure of a scratched plastic button brought the lift down and she took it to the top floor.

She came straight in. I don’t remember how the lynx or I got here. Along with the front door I had thrown all the curtains open and unlatched the windows and the polish on the dresser and the chairs our side of the dining table shone like gold dust in the first bleed of colour to the afternoon. She surprised me standing in the kitchen doorway, the toes of my kid leather shoes given false life and sclerosis in the long run by the washing up water, a fistful of plaid tea towel at my hip. She looked like Dodge. I once thought I looked a bit like Dodge but since then have had less tenuous notions.

You must be Max. She swung her bag off her shoulder and seemed as if she meant to drop it where she stood but hesitated.

Hello Eliza I said. Make yourself at home.

So the knapsack fell and because neither of us approached to shake hands we grinned and glanced around us and Eliza wiped her nose with the back of her hand and said yes she would like a cup of tea thanks and flopped down on the nearest armchair. She said I bet you don’t have a T.V.

I know it’s old fashioned I said and tried to imagine the place through the eyes of someone who had grown up elsewhere. Eliza had landed before one of the bay windows that opened over the Avenue. A suggestive view of the interior. The contents of the living room had been there a long time. The yellow and pink furniture was clean but threadbare and there were patches in the faded carpets where the strings of the warp showed through like a bad signal. Some of the furniture that used to be pink had become yellow. Between a pair of sliding doors ahead of her she could make out a line of the rubbed clutter in the dining room and to her right a corridor whose far end glowed with what might have been the coloured rhombs of a leadlight portal. The living room had begun to blaze.

She said it’s like some kind of museum. I said they rotate the exhibits there. Should do for the he said she said.

She nodded and we stayed as we were for a moment looking at each other. I hadn’t heard of Eliza either before Dodge’s funeral. I had assumed, living in a place like this, that the family was dead. Dodge had spoken about them but always in the past tense and her sister had seemed to flicker so dimly through the rooms of her memory that it was somewhat skipping a beat to be facing the issue without a chance first to get accustomed to the idea of that error from her childhood endowed enough to make her own mistakes. Apparently. Some hooch. I had never heard about a farm either but that was not surprising since it belonged to her mother’s side and that far out in the family Dodge only had stories about the Dutch bankers who made her father.

I left Eliza in the living room and went back to the kitchen. The armchair groaned behind me as I bent beneath the drying rack to let the plug out in the sink. She must have been curious, bewildered even. She was obviously not going to explain anything but all the same it was nice to have a change of company. It was not the same. The dishwater gurgled off in a nacreous slew of grease and detergent as I dried my hands and lit the burner beneath the kettle with a damp safety match, then I carried two cups on their saucers into the living room.