David Malouf - The Complete Stories

He wished desperately that they had allowed him to wash. More than his assailant's blood, it was the man's smell, which once it got into his head might be ineradicable, that he felt all over him; the rancidness and close animal stink of self-loathing. He began to tremble with delayed shock. Not for the danger he had been in but for how close he had stood to an anguish so intense that the only escape from it was into self-extinction. When he did fall at last into a fevered sleep he was in a place where there were no walls; his sleep was open to the communal cell opposite, he was surrounded by broken mutterings and cries whose foul breath he took into his lungs and breathed out as protests that found no sound except as echoes in his skull.

At some point he woke, or half-woke. Three or four black youths were being dragged to the door of his cell, shouting obscenities; but the constable must have thought better of it and pushed them on. There was a scuffle. Hard blows against something soft or hollow. Then a violent eruption as the cell opposite burst into a howling, and again he had in his nostrils the odour of his assailant's sweat. It was overpowering. He started up, shouting, and his cry was immediately taken up in a renewed frenzy of catcalls and yells.

He did not sleep again. He lay stiff and still, aware of the exchange of heavy night-heat for the clearer heat of day. Light came, and with it the shrill clattering among palm fronds and fig trees of thousands of starlings.

“Right, mate,” the new duty-officer told him, "you c'n have a bit ‘v a wash. Inspector'll see yer.”

He stood in the open doorway, severely official, and let Colin pass.

The working day had begun. The cells were being unlocked. Bleary-eyed but subdued, the night's pick-ups had begun shuffling out: drunks, derelicts, young toughs, barefoot and with tattoos on their calves, who had been hauled out of fist fights just on closing time or from round the doors of discos, thin young Aborigines, one or two with dreadlocks— the agents, or victims or both, of a violence that was random but everywhere on the loose. You had only to step into the path of it to be picked up and whirled about and shattered. It was something he had always known about the place but had allowed himself to take for metaphor. He was being reminded again that it was fact.

He washed, when his turn came, at the dirty basin, and drew wet fingers through his hair.

In the metal mirror above the tap he barely recognised himself. The metal distorted, but there was also the puffed eye and thickened lip. He looked, he thought, like a dead ringer of himself who for thirty years had lived a different and coarser life — maybe even that of the man he had been mistaken for.

The interrogation room appeared different in daylight. Larger. But the real difference was that Lindenmeyer and Creager had been pushed to the edges of it, one lounging in a chair by the typewriter, the other hunched into the window frame. The younger man who occupied the centre immediately offered Colin his hand. His name was McKinley.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Lattimer,” he said, all affability, "we've finally got things sorted out. You'll be free in just a minute.”

Without being obvious he made it clear that he knew quite well who he was dealing with, and might even, if pressed, have been able to produce a title.

Lindenmeyer and Creager watched closely, wearing faces that expressed different styles of contempt — whether for him or for their superior he could not guess.

Creager might have spent the remainder of the night in the derros’ cell. His tiny blue eyes had disappeared into the beef of his cheeks. He kept hitching his belt over the roll of his belly. Lindenmeyer, too intelligent not to feel that this writer bloke and the inspector made an oaf of him, boiled with resentment. Whatever residue of violence the room contained came from him.

“The man's out of danger,” McKinley was telling Colin. “Superficial wounds is what the report says. It wasn't a serious attempt.” He cleared his throat. “Mind you, he's still pretty convinced that he's got some grudge against you.”

The hint of a question in his voice made Colin say very firmly, for perhaps the twentieth time in the last eight hours, "I never saw the man in my life before.”

McKinley nodded.

“Well, don't concern yourself. On the evidence,” he said, as if evidence might not be the only thing to go by, "we accept that. The man doesn't, that's all. We're waiting for the psychiatrist's report.”

Lindenmeyer and Creager were grinning. McKinley paused, regarding him, Colin thought, with anticipation, as if, now that he was officially cleared, he might offer some private explanation of an affair that was still worryingly obscure. McKinley's interest at this point could be thought of as personal, literary — that was the suggestion— and Colin's obligation to explain, that of an author to a loyal but puzzled reader.

But Colin himself was in the dark. It might have helped, he thought, if he had had a name for the man he had struggled with, held close, beaten, and whose blood and sweat, mingled with his own, had discoloured the water in the dirty handbasin and gone swirling to join the rest of the city's scourings, the accumulated debris and filth of nearly a million souls.

What he had not been able to wash off was the claim that had been laid upon him. In some ward, in a hospital somewhere in the city, a man lay sedated, physically restrained perhaps, who still inwardly pursued him, consumed with resentment for the harm done to him by a shadowy third party to whom, Colin thought, he too was connected, but in ways so dark and undeclared that they might never be known.

But if McKinley did have a name, he did not offer it, and Colin knew that he could not ask.

“I'll just call your friend in,” he said, closing what had been for a moment an open silence.

Eric was outside and immediately turned to face them, substantial looking in a suit and tie, and already preparing, Colin saw, to take charge. His face was a mixture of concern for an old friend—"Are you okay, Colin?" — and prickly disdain for the ways of local officialdom.

McKinley too saw it, but stood back, too polite to let his irritation show. His attention was not on Eric but on a woman on the bench opposite, who looked up, and as she did so, met Colin's eye.

He knew immediately who she must be, and was aware too of the inspector's awakened interest. He was on the watch. Not out of professional interest now, but with that curiosity about human behaviour and its shifts and by-ways that made him both a policeman and a reader.

She was blonde, and coarse but sexy. He took in the soiled tank-top, the feet, which were dirty, in their high-heeled, patent-leather sandals, and felt a little shameful kick of desire.

A smile, half-scornful, drew down the corner of her mouth. She had caught the spark of attraction in him that might have confirmed, to a practised onlooker like the inspector, that his assailant's suspicions had to this extent at least been entirely plausible. For a moment they made a triangle, a second one, this woman, the inspector and himself. The tension of the moment was felt by all three.

It was Eric who broke it. “Come on, Colin,” he said. “Let's get you out of here.”

So it was over — or almost. In moving too quickly away under the double gaze of the inspector and the woman, Colin stumbled, very nearly fell, and found himself caught and supported by an arm that shot out from nowhere and belonged, when he looked up, to a young man in a crash-helmet who had been waiting at the counter to report a theft.

“Hey, steady on.”

“Sorry,” Colin said as he righted himself. Then, "Thanks.”

“She's right, mate.” The young man produced a grin that was all friendliness and good humour and a frankness that knew no guile.