Stray Dog Winter Page 2

  The inspector, spit gleaming between his grey teeth, picked at the edge of the passport photo. Darcy’s hair cut shorter in the picture, still streaked back then, but his eyes were surely the same, keen and unmistakable, the feminine aspect to his features. He pulled his Ray-Bans off and met the guard’s expression as if unintimidated, a sinking awareness of how the photo was only glued on; typically Australian, he thought. An instinct to run welled up as the inspector read from a slip of morse-coded paper. Examining the photo, he sucked his teeth as if wondering what sort of creature would streak his sandy hair black. He looked up with bloodshot eyes and launched into a throaty lecture in what Darcy sensed was an attempt at French.

  J’attends mon amie, Darcy interrupted, an attempt of his own, but he realised charm would get him nowhere. He pulled Fin’s address from his coat pocket and placed it on the desk. Dobrolyubova, 13-211 Ulitsa Kazakov, Moscow. The guard shaped the letters carefully, copying them onto the morse-coded paper, and Darcy felt the depth of his foreignness, the absence of language like dry ice sticking to his tongue.

  Welcome to Moscow, the words from behind him like manna, and with them a rush of cold air. And there she was, signature red lipstick against pearl-white skin, eyes glistening beneath their hooded lids. In the nick of time, as if she did it half on purpose. The inspector gazed up, took her in, her features slightly elfin, slightly shark-like, her eyes as green as Darcy’s were blue. She glowered at Darcy as if to say: what the fuck? A brown fur hat with a grass-green brim and a leather patchwork sheepskin coat he hadn’t seen before. Better late than not at all, he whispered, his voice a shadow of itself. She ungloved and spread a slender hand on the edge of the inspector’s desk. She spoke to him fluently, tilting her head. A gesture she and Darcy had in common—or had he picked it up from her? The timbre of her voice lower in Russian, sultrier, perhaps not just from smoking, but studied, unfaltering. Just three years of Russian at Monash and barely five months here. A gift for languages he didn’t have.

  The inspector improved his posture, responded, and Fin translated. A message sent ahead by the train conductor: photos taken. She cocked her head again, but this time she was imitating, gripping the fur ends of her scarf. He wants to examine your camera, she said.

  Darcy reluctantly unzipped the pocket of his backpack and fished out his Pentax leaf-shutter sports model, three hundred dollars from Tom the Cheap in Dandenong. I took a shot of a woman in a field, he said.

  She must have been strategic, said Fin, extending a hand. Her nails were painted a foresty brown.

  She handed the camera over to the inspector, smoothed him along with quiet conversation, the guttural language seemed to lilt from her lips, while he fiddled with the camera until the back clicked open, a shining roll of undeveloped pictures released onto the arm of his chair. Darcy mourned shots of Albanian feet, foxes frolicking in snow through the smoky train window, the endless steppe. Fin turned to Darcy with a cool, false calm, retying her scarf. We can go, she said.

  He still has my passport.

  She eyed Darcy intently. Later, she said, teeth gritted, then flashed a sharp, pained smile. I need my passport, he said, stubborn now, but she grabbed his arm. We’ll come back.

  Fin waved to her new inspector friend as he watched her from his office doorway, still holding Darcy’s camera. Her seduction had currency here. The Albanian stood nearby, his socks bulging through the straps of his sandals. Darcy paused to acknowledge him but Fin took his arm. Don’t say anything, she whispered, the warmth of her breath in his ear.

  Out in the cold, among the crowd of commuters and blaring announcements, they hugged each other hard. The familiar musk of her Prince Matchabelli, her cold sepulchral cheek. As she held her narrow frame to his, Darcy felt his loneliness transcended; in her strength and frailness he knew why he’d come.

  O

  The night fell quickly, swathed in fog. The taxi driver hunched low against the door, eating as he drove. It smelled like herring. Fin produced a pack of Gauloises and patted the box, offered Darcy one. After all, it’s Europe, she said. Sort of. Darcy cupped his hands over her flame, uncertain if it was a reward or consolation. Her lighter was covered in hammers and sickles, and she smoked with a small black cigarette holder, a new affectation. She rotated the slim silver ring in her nostril.

  I can’t believe you let him keep my passport.

  Don’t be too chatty, she said. She motioned with her chin at the driver, but Darcy sensed it as an excuse. I needed a transit visa for Poland, he added, then he saw the driver’s eyes brush across the rear-view mirror and fell silent. He looked out at the bluish sprays from occasional street lamps, the red tentacles of the tail-lights.

  You’ll need to be careful, said Fin, her lips left slightly parted as she returned the cigarette to them.

  You were the one who told me it was good to seem naïve.

  Not that naïve, she said, smiling.

  Darcy stared out at the grim-looking people, eyes down as they crossed at the lights. I was only taking photos of the countryside, he said.

  I know, she said. I’m just glad you’re here. She placed her fleece-lined fingers over his ski gloves but his hand felt unsteady. He’d always assumed he was expert at being out of his element, he’d always been that, but he’d never been this far away.

  This is my home, said Fin, as though gleaning an aspect of his thought. Sometimes it seemed they didn’t need to speak at all. She gazed out as if the darkness held some private fascination. She seemed different here, somehow uneasy; she usually found everything funny. Darcy was used to sharing adventures with her, the secrets only she knew, but now he decided he wouldn’t mention his encounter in the station in Prague, how he’d felt jangled by it, the glazed collusion in the soldier boy’s eyes, how easily it had skewered him. But that had been Prague and this was Moscow. He promised himself again.

  It’s great you’re here, said Fin, giving him a weary but grateful smile. He wondered why she’d said it twice. As the taxi turned to cross the river, Darcy caught their twin reflections mirrored in the window, two sides of a coin. Almost thirteen years since he’d first seen her on the drive in Mount Eliza. When she was young her hair had been untidy and long, so fair it was almost white, blonder than his. Now it was cropped, orange hints of it poking from beneath her fur hat. Her freckles had faded to silk. A slight masculinity in the set of her mouth, a firmness. He was tempted to reach over and touch her face.

  The bridge seemed foolishly wide and foreboding, statues of heroes. Fog hung in layers through a light that shed like a scrim on the river, the ice glistened black like shards of coal. See the Kremlin, said Fin, turning.

  Behind them, he made out the vague misted beams from towers. The driver coughed into a handkerchief, skirted a street sign fallen onto the road. The fabric of the city is fraying, said Fin, as though she’d lived here since the time of Stalin. The way her eyes held the distance without squinting.

  Do you have a man here? he asked.

  In lieu of an answer she drew deeply from her cigarette and blew two quick smoke rings in Darcy’s direction, pointed to the distant gates of Gorky Park. On a clear night you can see the lights of the Ferris wheel above the trees, she said.

  They turned into a street that was narrower than the grand boulevards, and darker, rimmed by low-rise apartments: Ulitsa Kazakov. The taxi parked outside a red brick building with curved art deco corners. Old-fashioned, iron-framed guillotine windows. Three storeys high with an identical block beside it: her brave new world. Is it a special place for foreigners? asked Darcy.

  If I’d wanted to live with Australians I’d have stayed there, she said. They didn’t quite think of themselves as Australian, their mothers from California, but that didn’t make Fin or Darcy feel American either. They came from a country of their own. It had two inhabitants.

  Fin negotiated the fare while Darcy unloaded. It seemed the driver wanted extra for carrying bags he hadn’t handled. Fin gave him a note and dismissed him in a
n offhand way that reminded Darcy of his mother.

  As the taxi receded through the slush, the mist iced Darcy’s face, dampening his cigarette, and then the street was quiet save for the whining of lorries from a main road, the buzz of the overhead wires. Fin was silent too as they followed a side path to a raised courtyard littered with snow, up some stairs that whistled with cold. He’d never imagined this kind of cold.

  In the corridor, the burgundy carpet was black along the edges from damp, the smell of cabbage boiling, urine-stained walls. A man stood at the end where there wasn’t a light. I expected a babushka at a desk, said Darcy.

  Fin unlocked a deadbolt and top lock; the door had two utility handles. A large broken sign was nailed in her entry hall, oxidised Cyrillic letters. That’s cool, said Darcy.

  From a demolition.

  The apartment was stuffy, the smell of burnt oil and vegetables. He plonked down his pack and duffel. An ancient Bakelite radio played softly on an end table beside a worn velvet couch draped in a swirled blue sheet. He hoped he wasn’t sleeping there.

  You can’t turn down the central heating, said Fin. She didn’t switch on the lights.

  Through the window a woman stood in a kitchen in the building opposite, not thirty feet away. She didn’t look up as Fin forced the window slightly open. I call her Svetlana, said Fin.

  Why aren’t there curtains? asked Darcy.

  They get taken down.

  By whom?

  It’s hard to know.

  He followed her into a bedroom without windows. A poster from the 1980 Olympics, five rings like halos above an image of Brezhnev. He looks like Gargie, said Darcy, except for the eyebrows. Fin didn’t answer. She never acknowledged his grandmother as her own, but it wasn’t just that. She was preoccupied. She closed the bedroom door behind them, then turned on the bedside lamp.

  Above the bed hung long black peasant dresses on wooden hangers, empty cigarette boxes pinned on their fronts among white-painted quotes from Tolstoy. I thought you were painting smokestacks, said Darcy.

  Fin unwound her scarf, watched him with eyes that almost seemed blue in the light. I thought you might help me with that.

  Whatever you like, he said hopefully. I came to be with you. He lay his gloves on the end of the bed as if claiming a place. It would be cool to make art here, he said. He foresaw the shapes of chemical factories and power stations, grain elevators thrusting into the skies.

  Fin’s pillows were stained; she must have dyed her hair and slept with it wet. Blood on the pillows, he said. Nice. A T-shirt lay on the covers—the logo read Keep Holland Beautiful: Get Tattooed. He wondered how it was she’d been to Holland.

  Show me your tattoo, he said; he imagined a rose engraved on her ankle or a red star on her shoulderblade. But she wasn’t in a playful mood.

  It was a gift, she said.

  He wasn’t sure if she meant the trip, the tattoo or the T-shirt. She pointed at his waist, extending a brown ungloved fingernail. I have to return your girdle, she whispered. It belongs to a friend. She hadn’t taken off her coat or hat.

  Darcy felt a stab of suspicion. It was my belated birthday present, he said. You have to return it now?

  She nodded, her finger pressed to her lips with such intensity it unnerved him. She wasn’t fooling. He unbuckled the money belt, fishing his bundle of roubles from the front. Coins left from Prague, his ANZ Visa card and international driver’s licence. He dangled the plain leather belt by the strap and for a moment it hung in the air between them. Maybe there was a sleeve sewn in the back of it, he couldn’t tell; maybe he’d been her pack mule after all. She grabbed it and hitched it under her coat as if she was used to attaching the fastener. Stay here, she said. She grabbed her scarf and gloves and left, bolting the front door behind her.

  Mount Eliza, Autumn 1972

  When Darcy’s mother appeared in the Vauxhall at the end of the drive, Darcy dropped the knapsack. His father stood by the girl, motionless, as if in a painting, while Darcy’s mother stared, putting pieces together. She saw what she saw and then she was shouting. Darcy dropped the girl’s bag and hid where he always hid, inside his dead grandmother’s little blue car, a bubble-shaped Austin of England parked behind the shed.

  He heard the Vauxhall door slam, the kitchen flywire, the fridge opening, the flywire again. She’d have her Gilbey’s and tonic in her hand. She’d sit in her folding beach chair around the side where the incinerator smoked against the chestnut tree, and drink. And her mind would be working so hard you could almost see it in the veins that reddened her forehead.

  Darcy could still see the girl, she was down in the gravel now, wouldn’t budge, even as Darcy’s father tried to drag her up to the house. In the end his father just left her there and walked up alone. He didn’t look at Darcy in the Austin, just veered off to Darcy’s mother and her drink.

  Darcy leaned back in the seat, a moment of silence. He imagined them there, beside the burning leftovers, his father mumbling admissions, and then she was yelling again. Darcy furiously practised the gears, his legs straining to reach the pedals, doubling the clutch like his father did on the Humphries Road hill. Another round of shouts and he closed his eyes tight, the way he did to avoid the sound of her battle fatigue. That’s what she called it.

  When he opened his eyes, the girl was standing at the passenger door, watching. She held the knapsack to her chest, her face set. They heard glass breaking, and she turned towards the sound. In the sharpness of her profile and her hooded eyes, Darcy saw both his mother and his aunt, but mostly he saw himself. And then he realised she was waiting for him to open the door and he wondered if that’s what she was used to.

  She got in warily, sat on the vinyl seat and rummaged around in her knapsack as if making sure everything was still there. Darcy looked out across the drive. The sun was now shimmering through the flowering gums, setting down molten somewhere over Davies Bay. What’s it like where you come from? he asked. He’d tried to picture it from photos in the National Geographic; the presidents carved into rocks, the bridges extending over the bays.

  She looked at him askance. The sunsets are better, she said. Her accent was different from his, like from television. She touched the knob on the glove compartment.

  That’s private, said Darcy. He hid things in there: the Risen Jesus pamphlet and the Book of Mormon from the missionary, Jesus in the Americas, his grandmother’s travelling clock.

  So’s my bag, said the girl.

  He didn’t dare look at her, played with the worn leather cover on the gear stick. I just wanted to know who you were, he said.

  Satisfied?

  Darcy tried to catch reverse but he could never quite get it up and over. You’re my sister, he said.

  Kind of, she said.

  I never heard of you. He played with the plastic dinosaur that dangled from the key chain. You’ll have to sleep inside, he said. On the foldaway. He figured he’d spend the night out here in the back seat, under the picnic blanket. He might need to sleep in the car forever; his mother was screeching like a parrot.

  I’m not staying, said the girl, looking down the drive. She just dropped me off for a visit. But Darcy could see how the girl braced her eyes and cheeks to hold back tears. Then Darcy’s father appeared with his sheepish face and a drink.

  Is he your father? asked the girl.

  Darcy nodded as if it was obvious. Who do you think he is?

  When his father got to the car they were silent. His father’s mid-section through the passenger window, his penal colony Darcy’s mother called it, the cause of all the problems.

  The girl opened the door and took the glass suspiciously, gulped it down then let the glass drop on the bricks so it shattered. She knew about accidentally on purpose as if she’d learned from Darcy’s mother.

  Darcy’s father said nothing, knelt down and picked up the shards of glass, feeling on the ground to find them. He stood with the splinters of glass cupped in his hands. Naughty, he said, heading
back towards the incinerator.

  It was only cordial, said Darcy.

  The girl ignored him at first, reached into the back seat and pulled Darcy’s picnic blanket through, wrapped herself inside it like a big woollen scarf. My mother says he’s a bastard anyway, she said. She glared out from the blanket, and even though she’d just arrived she made Darcy feel disloyal.

  He got out and went to the Vauxhall, picked up the grocery bag his mother had abandoned, along with her mohair picnic blanket, brought them back to the Austin. He tore the silver top of the milk bottle free and passed the bottle to the girl, then he ripped open the ginger nut biscuits.

  Another episode of shrieking from the side of the house.

  What do you do here? asked the girl.

  Sometimes I drive, said Darcy nonchalantly. He now let off the parking brake and they rolled a few inches. I don’t have a licence for night-time, he added.

  The girl looked over at him like he was an idiot and it made him feel young. The fact was, since the day he ran into the ti-trees on Baden Powell Drive he’d been banned from driving. Since the day he met the missionary.

  He peeled a mandarin, threw the pith out the window, and handed a decent section to the girl. As she ate it, she leaned against the door and closed her eyes and Darcy wished he hadn’t said the thing about the licence. Outside the daylight was fading, the silhouette of his father on the phone through the living-room window, making his calls.

  She’ll be back, said the girl, her eyes opening for a second, but they glistened in the dark and Darcy knew Aunt Merran was gone. He slipped between the seats to the back and lay down, covered himself with the mohair, listened to the girl in the front, her occasional whimpers, his mother’s sporadic shouts, a bottle smashed against the incinerator. He knew everything would be different this time, for everyone, not just for him. The missionary was his secret and he held it close, but this girl was his father’s. Darcy was glad to be near her but he guessed she wouldn’t be here for long—he knew his mother, and he knew secrets were best when they were secret.