Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Then from inside the cave Polyphemus answered:
‘No One is killing me.’

Homer, Odyssey, Book IX

Chapters

For a long time I used to drive around the city late at night, but why I found myself in the ghost hours of that Monday morning nineteen years ago on Lawson Street I can no longer recall. Nothing remains for me but the sound – a dull thud, like a roo hitting the side of the car – and the dreamlike slowness of my realisation. I had almost driven past Redfern Park before I pulled over to the kerb to collect my thoughts. The park was empty except for a couple of men sleeping rough between the roots of a large fig. I drove a little further on so as not to disturb them. It must have been a dog, I thought. What else would have been on the road at that time of night?

I left the car idling and got out. At that time I was driving a Volvo station wagon I bought from a drummer who had fallen on hard times. I can’t remember now what I paid for it but it wasn’t much. I had the impression he must have driven largely by feel; there were dings and scratches all over it, and a couple of larger dents at the front and rear. His face had seemed pocked in the same way; even a three-day growth could not hide what must have been an adolescent devastation. While we were negotiating the price, I noticed how his fingers tapped out an endless rhythm on the bonnet. Over the course of the next few months I found three drumsticks beneath the seats, all of them crazed with shreds. I saw him play years later in a pub in Surry Hills but left before the show finished. I had by that time sold the car so there was nothing we might have talked about, although I had kept one of the drumsticks. I watched him closely as he played. The sticks hit the metal rim of the large drum before making contact with the skin.

The streetlight was dead where I pulled over, but I could see a dent on the passenger side where I had heard the thud, close to where the front bumper ended. It looked like a large dimple and I traced its depth with my fingers. It could easily have been there from the time of the drummer. But I had heard a sound, and the more I thought about it, the more I came to believe I had also felt a small impact. My investigations in the dark could not be conclusive, so the only solution was to drive back to Lawson Street. I have never been close to animals, but if it was a dog, I didn’t like the thought of its pain.

I didn’t pass another car as I made my way back along Redfern Street. The quietness didn’t strike me as strange. Perhaps the city was quieter in those days, or perhaps it’s just my memory. I can’t say. The sound had occurred on that section of Lawson Street which crosses over the rail lines. I remembered standing there often when I was living in one of the foster homes that marked my childhood like fence posts; I used to pull myself up onto the brick wall and stand there as the trains passed underneath.

I got out of the car and leaned against the brick wall. It was exactly as I remembered it. There was more light here than at the park, and I pulled myself up onto the wall as I used to do almost every school-day afternoon. It was a strange sensation, as if something also pulled itself up within me, and I swayed a little. I looked down to where the tracks disappeared in the distance, swallowed by the lights of the larger city beyond. I climbed down from the wall and looked around. There was no dog to be seen. I looked again at the Volvo’s front panel. In the streetlight it appeared to me now that there might be tiny filaments of blood around the rim of the dent, but I couldn’t be sure. In all the years I owned the car I don’t remember ever washing it.

On the road behind where I had parked I noticed what looked like a mark. When I bent down to examine it more closely I was overcome by a momentary vertigo. A week after I was placed in their care, I was taken by my first foster parents to look at a small cave in the country south of their property near Katherine, a place my new father would often take me later when he went hunting for roos. When I turned on the torch he had given me, it seemed to me as if I had wakened a zoo full of hibernating creatures come out of the darkness in which they had slept for a thousand years. There were hands, larger than my own, stencilled in ochre, and kangaroos and crocodiles and snakes and fish, not painted onto the surface of the rock, but rather like apparitions that had come up through the rock somehow to be seen. Everything was getting confused in my mind. There was blood on the road: it had dried to the colour of those apparitions in the cave. And the creature that had left it – where was it, if not an apparition itself, gone back into the road?

The vertigo passed and I moved back to the car. I looked again at the depression in the front panel. It seemed larger now, and higher on the body. A dog could not have made such a dint, I thought, or only a dog as large as a man or a roo. What I did then I can’t account for. For some reason I looked up, as if I felt I was being watched, though I knew there was no one there. I’ve come to think that everything that followed can be traced back to that sensation, though if someone were to ask me what it was, I would be at a loss to explain. I often feel in any case that language is really no more than a banging of our head against a wall.

I’m plagued by a recurring dream that comes to me only in parts. Or so I’ve thought. Because recently I’ve come to realise that what I’d taken to be separate parts are in fact connected, like limbs of the same body. The realisation felt like I’d put together the pieces of a puzzle. That the dream had started as a story that someone had cut into pieces and shuffled wildly, then presented to me as I slept in a random sequence that has lasted for almost sixteen years. But though it makes sense to me to think of it this way, I now believe the opposite is the case: that the dream started as one random fragment following another with no original whole, only finding that whole somehow as it went, moving towards (I can put it no other way) something that did not yet exist.

The dream is about my father: my father and me in East Berlin. Which is strange because I have never been to East Berlin, and yet in the dream I am the same age as my father and seem to know the city better than he does. But what is even stranger is that my father, too, had never been to East Berlin: as a recently married man, he once told me, he had lived for a brief period in the west of the city, but he had lived in Istanbul for many years more by the time he was the age in the dream (his parents had fled Baghdad when he was still a boy), and it was to Istanbul he was forced to return with my mother after my birth and before their escape to Australia.

For some reason this dislocation affects me more than anything else, perhaps because it reminds me of a similar dislocation he told me about on another occasion. He remembered being left alone with the Kurdish peasant girls who lived in his home. The girls were quite young, only ten or twelve years old, though at least twice the age of my father, and had been brought by their families from the border villages to Baghdad, where they worked as servants in more affluent homes. They became my father’s earliest friends. When it grew dark, he said, they all huddled together on a low divan and began telling stories about werewolves and vampires. Of all the folktales he heard, my father said, only the ones about werewolves and vampires stayed in his memory. ‘Every detail of them is present in my mind,’ he said, ‘but not in the language I heard them in. I heard them in Kurdish, but I know them in Turkish; this mysterious translation is perhaps the oddest thing I have to tell you about my youth.

‘My parents – your grandparents – spoke to me in Arabic,’ he went on to say. ‘But the peasant girls at home knew only Kurdish, so I must have learned it with them. But since Kurdish was never spoken at school, as I grew up and my parents could no longer afford to keep the girls, I soon forgot it completely. I don’t know at what point in time this or that translated itself. It could only have happened later, after we had taken refuge in Istanbul. I never probed into the matter; perhaps I was afraid to destroy my most precious memories with too careful an examination. I can say only one thing with certainty. Those stories from my earliest childhood are present in my mind in all their freshness, but they are tied to words I did not know at the time.’

Through all his explanation, his eyes were wide with amazement recalled. And he concluded by telling me it seemed natural to him even now to remember them in this language. ‘I don’t have the feeling that I am changing anything,’ he said. ‘It’s not like the translation of a book from one language to another; it’s a translation that happened of its own accord. I can understand it in no other way.’

That’s all I remember him telling me, though the words might have changed in my memory. I suspect he told me some of the stories – they still thrilled him – but none of them remain, no matter how hard I try to salvage them. The dislocation of my dream is of another order, and yet I experience it, like my father, as one of language. My parents spoke Turkish to me in our home in Istanbul, though they spoke Arabic to each other. My father also spoke fluent German, though he never spoke a word of it to me or my mother as far as I recall. And yet when my father and I speak to each other in the dream, it is in German.

Two weeks before the accident, I found myself thinking again about my father and his life. I was at an exhibition of paintings by Francis Bacon, which I’d come upon after walking up from the harbour in the nearby Botanical Gardens. I didn’t like the paintings, but there was something in them that troubled me, and the afternoon I thought again of my father was the fourth afternoon I had been to look at them in a week. Bacon paints bodies that are tortured, stunted, caged, displayed, turned inside out or outside in (it’s never clear exactly), allowed an escape but not wanting one, perhaps because, despite the mutilation, there is no suffering, it seems, no pain, which is exactly what history does to the past, to the reality of human wretchedness – history and dreams – it divests it of its pain. Bacon’s paintings look as if a human being has passed over them, leaving behind a trail of its presence, just as history and dreams, like a snail, leave their slime.

I was familiar with the area around Rachel Forster Hospital. It doubled as a community centre. I used to ride my bike on the footpath around the hospital. No one talked about communities when I was growing up. Katherine was worse. My second foster parents (I had five before I came of age – in Katherine, Redfern, Bourke, Broken Hill and Cessnock – with a brief time at an orphanage in Lismore between Bourke and Broken Hill) lived two blocks away, on Raglan Street, in the shadow of the tower blocks. I must have gone to school around here too, but I remember nothing of it. All I remember is riding round and round the hospital, slowing to peer in through the doors whenever they’d open, hoping to see I don’t know what.

I don’t know why I was here now. There was no one on the street, but inside, in the waiting area, there was barely a vacant seat. Who were these people? How had they come here? Pain, sickness, fear produce in rooms like this either a kind of catatonia, or histrionics that border on hysteria. A man younger than me had laid his crutches between two seats as a kind of barrier or bridge – I couldn’t tell which. His eyes were open but he sat as if what he was looking at was not before him. From time to time he emitted a barely audible groan, or his hand jerked up to his shaved head to pick at a bloody scab; it moved as if pulled by an invisible thread. Apart from these tics he was as silent and still as an indoor plant. A large Aboriginal woman wrapped in what looked to be a curtain was trying to pacify a man who may well have been her son and would not be still but paced up and down the aisle, shouting across at the woman at reception and complaining they weren’t paying him any attention. He kept walking in front of me, trying to catch my eye. He seemed to thrum, the noise coming everywhere from his body at once. Two Aboriginal boys sat nearby but gave no indication of any connection to either the woman or the man. They didn’t speak to each other but looked on as if an audience to a play.

When finally I managed to get back into the car and leave the site of the accident, I didn’t know at first where I was driving. A silence seemed to have settled around me, as if I had lost my hearing. I ended up at the hospital before I realised where I was. I still wasn’t sure if I had done anything wrong, but I couldn’t get the sound of that small thud, which had grown great in its smallness, out of my head. If I had hit someone, I must have thought, perhaps they had come to the closest hospital – on their own, if they were able to walk, or with the aid of some good Samaritan who may have happened upon them after I had driven on. I can’t recapture my thinking from that time. But it makes sense to think that might have been the case.

I didn’t enter the hospital immediately but remained in the car, my hands on the wheel, my head resting on my arms as if between two rails. I don’t know if I saw it then or if it was a discomfort against my head; whatever the case, as the engine made its cooling noises I became aware of the watch on my wrist. It was a gold Omega Seafarer, inscribed as a gift from my mother to my father for New Year 1967 – the year, I think, of my birth. My father gave it to me on the night he disappeared. It had stopped working somewhere on the journey over. I wear it every day. It stopped at 3:17, though whether am or pm is impossible to say.

While I waited for the words to come together so that I might approach the woman who sat behind the glass wall, a figure covered loosely by a blanket, with a tube coming out of its nose connected to a small cylinder, its wrists and ankles fastened with leather straps, was wheeled in on a shining metal gurney by two ambulance men. There was blood visible in the figure’s hair, and dark blotches on the blanket around its stomach and chest. Beneath the opiate glaze of its eyes I could see the distress, like one of those tiny bugs caught in amber. It brought to my mind in that sudden mode of transport peculiar to memory the smash repair yard I used to drive past every morning on the way to school in Katherine. I think it might even have been owned by my foster mother’s brother. It was certainly the place for death: elegies of plastic and steel stretching as far as the eye could see, left to the weeds and to rust. I remember one car, a silver Mercedes, in the drive by the gate where my foster father told me to wait while he talked to his brother-in-law in the office, drops of blood dried to resin on the dash and flecks of hair and scalp behind the twisted steering wheel. Accidents do impossible things to human bodies. I have walked around wreckers’ yards since, imagining space backwards from the wrecks, like a film running in reverse, sucking the pieces of body back through the glass and making the passenger whole again. Even with a hydraulic ram you couldn’t simulate a head at speed. As if all the unlived life concentrated in that instant before death, and exploded.

I didn’t approach the woman behind the glass. The words never came. Even if I told her I thought I might have hit someone, what could she say? No one was going to give up that kind of information to a stranger who’d just walked in off the street. Especially at this time of night.

I looked around the waiting room again. In the seat next to me, a girl was tinkering absently with saucer-like headphones attached to a small electronic device resting in her lap. Next to her, a man approximately the same age, who had wrapped his hair up into a pale turban, was busily grooming his impressive beard with a small tortoiseshell comb that seemed designed specifically for that purpose and was like no comb I have ever seen, each tine a different thickness, and inexplicably spaced at uneven intervals along the bow of the almost translucent bridge. I watched him for some time in that state of hypnosis that any seemingly regular, if unusual, act induces in such places at such hours. Sunday night. Casualty. Albert Street, Redfern.

As I sat there, unable to speak yet unable to leave, two women came through the doors surrounded by several police officers. Their clothes were rumpled, as if they had just come out of a police van. They were wearing fur coats and each was handcuffed at the wrists. They crossed the room quickly and disappeared into the corridor beside the woman behind the glass. I wondered where the corridor led, and if the person I had hit had been steered down there too. If I waited long enough, I thought, perhaps I would see him emerge, his arm in a sling, or hobbling on crutches. I hoped it wasn’t anything worse.

There were more dark faces now than I’d noticed when I first walked in. But how could that be? No one, apart from the figure on the gurney and the two women escorted by the police, had come in after me. If my victim was here, it could have been any one of them. What did I have to lose? I knew I wouldn’t be capable of shouting, but what did emerge, finally, after two false starts, was comical, like the quack of a duck: ‘Has anyone here just been hit by a car?’ No response. Perhaps they hadn’t heard me. My throat was tight now and I was breathing quickly, but I managed to squeeze out, louder this time: ‘Has anyone been hit by a car?’ Not everyone looked at me, but on the faces of those who did was not even acknowledgement I was speaking a common language. Only the woman behind the glass stood up.

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