A Night With No Stars Read online

  He blinked out at the eerie night sky which cast his old roller blind a strange silvery colour, and if he moved his head just a little, could see the ivory disc of a full moon hover over Redfern’s tenement blocks. There was something about it which stirred his memory and made him swing his tanned legs off the mattress with more vigour than anything he’d recently done at work. He switched on the shadeless bulb which hung from the ceiling by a knotted black flex, peed into the small cracked hand basin, then washed himself thoroughly all over with the tepid water which came one-paced from the single lime-scaled tap.

  He checked himself in the mirror nailed over the sink. He looked okay, he thought, considering, and decided to leave the three days’ stubble on his chin. In fact, every guy who was someone in Sydney was doing the same. Besides, it made him look older which was no bad thing.

  Having doused himself with Urgent, a leaving present from the sheilas at the bank, he dressed in his work clothes and the expensive trenchcoat which he always kept in a dry clean wrap behind the door. That way he’d come over as a guy on business or a lawyer even, especially with his briefcase and matching luggage kindly donated by his boss and the Senior Team.

  He checked his travel documents yet again. He’d been systematic about all of that, but at some cost to his recent social life. However, it was worth it and nothing was now more pleasurable than to safely retuck the white-smile photos, the proof of his dual nationality and return visa into their special pale pigskin wallet. Next he counted out all the pounds sterling he’d saved since last March; since his decision to shake off a life of forever looking over his shoulder; suspicious of strangers and the secrets behind their eyes. Why he’d shacked up in Redfern in the first place. It was a cesspit, but had suited his need for anonymity. He’d lived cheap, walked to the bank on Upper Street which kept him fit and where he could shower, and now it was time to say adios.

  ‘See you, mate,’ he said to the Abo crashed out by the stairs, careful not to let the man’s liquid laugh reach his shoes. Its smell stuck in his throat as he hefted his suitcase over the Aborigine’s legs, noting how his flies were undone and a hint of purple cock showed through the gap in his jeans.

  Within five minutes, he was in Elizabeth Street and stopping a cab. As he closed its door behind him he glanced back at the dark screen of squats and, forgetting he was in the presence of a stranger – the driver – let out a burst of laughter. Part relief, part triumph because his mission was underway, and in two hours from now, he’d be in the air, leaving winter behind.

  ‘Had a good night, mate?’ asked the driver, a redneck in a quilted jacket. ‘Or shouldn’t I ask?’

  ‘Ace, yeah.’ He enjoyed, even encouraged this kind of banter. He knew he looked like the kind of spunk any half-decent sheila would drop her grundies for. So where was the harm in perpetuating the myth? It made him feel a real man, especially after the sexual humiliations he’d endured in The Lucky Country.

  ‘Does she have a name?’ The driver persisted, following airport signs and fiddling with his radio.

  ‘Eve.’

  ‘But not the first, eh?’

  ‘Shit, no,’ he laughed again, letting the man have his delusions. Then he stopped abruptly as the midnight news delivered by a woman newsreader’s clipped, educated voice filtered into the cab. Each syllable she spoke made his breath tighten. Made the kilometres between him and his plane too many.

  ‘Hey, get an ear on this,’ the other man turned up the volume and leaned forwards as if to miss nothing. ‘Nasty stuff.’

  ‘Sydney police report that a sand cleaner on Bondi near The Pavilion has discovered the partially decomposed body of a young white Caucasian woman. So far there’s been no formal identification and in the meantime the public are requested to keep away from the area until forensic teams have completed their investigation of the site. Meanwhile, Police Chief Bill Shaw has stated that it’s possible the body has lain there undetected for at least five months and that records of all females missing around that time are being checked . . .’

  ‘Never fancied there,’ Robert lied. Yet as the moon continued to illumine the city’s southern suburbs, and party-goers making their way home, he recalled lonely summer evenings with just other people’s yabbering and the roar of the waves climaxing against the shore for company. ‘Poor cow.’

  ‘Yeah. I’ve got a kid sister,’ said the driver, reducing the radio’s volume as the latest on the UK’s foot-and-mouth crisis hit the airwaves. ‘Was just imagining how my folks’d be taking this news if it was her . . .’

  His fare was thinking how imagination seemed the least of his attributes, when a surprise question threw him yet again.

  ‘You from Redfern, then?’

  ‘No. King’s Cross.

  ‘Right. Pukka place.’

  ‘Yeah. But a guy can’t stay in the chicken coop all his life. Got to see the world before he snuffs it.’

  ‘No Nasho then?’

  He hesitated. Being turned down for a digger in the army was not something written in bold capitals on his CV, and only he and his doctor back in Darwin knew that an uncorrectable medical problem had been the reason.

  Uncorrectable? I don’t think so . . .

  With relief, he saw the airport lights beckoning. He just wanted this cockroach to shut the fuck up and get him there.

  ‘Plenty of world in our house, if you want to look at it that way.’

  He didn’t, but the man went on regardless.

  ‘My kid’s just had grandchild number four. Got a unit on our second floor and pays us ninety dollars a month. Works out fine.’

  ‘Sounds cosy.’

  ‘Yeah. Company for the wife. Means I don’t have to work Fridays.’

  ‘By the way, I’ve been thinking,’ Robert blinked as a booze bus overtook them and sped off along the dual carriageway. ‘That girl in the sand. I reckon she’s been dumped there recently from somewhere else. So she would be found.’

  ‘Why do that? Sounds risky to me.’

  ‘Must be a crook playing Hare and Hounds. Remember getting high being chased at school?’

  ‘Yeah, I do, come to think of it.’ He winked into his driving mirror. ‘How I met the wife. In the playground.’

  ‘I didn’t major in Psychology for nothing,’ Robert grinned back, sensing his pulse quicken as the cab slid into a designated bay near the QF International Terminal building.

  ‘Paid your departure tax, by the way?’

  ‘With my ticket.’

  He added a generous tip to the fare and collected his luggage from the boot.

  ‘Good luck wherever it is you’re going,’ the cabbie called out as he unrolled yesterday’s paper for a re-read.

  ‘I’ll need it. Cheers.’

  He stood there in the chilly night and shivered. The well-wisher had caught him off guard and for a split second he considered changing his mind and hopping back into the warm cab. Then he heard the oncoming rumble of a plane coming in and visualised again as he’d done so often, what would be waiting for him once he’d landed, and knew that turning back was simply not an option.

  Twenty-four hours later Robert collected his Vuitton luggage from the flight’s crowded carousel in London Heathrow’s Terminal 2 and made his way through the cattle-market crush of travellers towards the escalator.

  Once through the exit gates he noticed two things. Firstly, that everyone seemed to have a cling-on who welcomed them with the kind of noises made during sex. Weird that, he thought. Secondly the clothes these overweight Poms were wearing were not a good omen. Was the economy so bad here that they could only afford shell-suits and polyester trackies? he asked himself trying to push his way through as quickly as possible. Hardly, judging by what he’d heard in the bank and a thorough perusal of the Australian Times on his non-stop flight.

  The scene before him was like no one could be arsed any more. But was that really such a bad thing given his forthcoming agenda? Nor should he complain that the Bondi business wasn’t
mentioned in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald. There’d been enough time to look for it during the flight, dammit, so he binned it as he made his way towards the nearest cafe and when he reached the counter, ordered an espresso.

  The Chinese girl handed him his heavy little cup and saucer with that kind of inscrutable look he’d never got used to, even at school. Yet her lips, soft and bud-like, looked as if they could give good head. Yeah, he’d been there and had that done in the Chinatown clubs more times than he cared to remember. Just so far and no further. Always the same deal – accepted and paid for. Beyond that, well . . . That was his personal business. No one else’s.

  He finished his coffee and made for the sunlit tarmac outside the automatic doors. The few visibly armed cops prowling around didn’t bother him nor the dark-skinned dero who harangued for change. Normally, in a more private place, he’d have kicked him in the nuts and told him about the boats his country used, bobbing around for ever in the Indian Ocean. But not now. Because here was evening sun on his skin, warming his blood and as he strode away with black shoes shining, and gelled hair glistening towards the nearby Novotel building, he knew that for him, the crucial transition from darkness into light was just beginning.

  Chapter Three

  The ravens answer to my call,

  They imitate and read my mind,

  My brothers all, in black so fine,

  Are never cruel, always kind.

  Englynion. c RFJ 1986

  If only she, Lucinda Caroline Mitchell, had been able to share this terrible secret with her one surviving parent, it might have made all the difference to her post-June life and helped her get the work setbacks more in perspective. But how could a convent-educated girl confess to her serial church-going mother that a man like Benn had so easily flattered her? The answer was, she couldn’t.

  Nor could she have told Jon Sadler, trainee partner with a firm of solicitors in Clerkenwell. They’d been an item since her first year at Warwick, and both had sensed parents increasingly impatient for the engagement ring, the wedding and their chance to be eventual grandparents. Now in mid-August, free of her job, her grungy flat, with the prospect of a new era opening up, he too, was past tense and she hadn’t seen him or his parents since a trip to Kew the weekend before her attack. If she’d happened to be Jewish and married, divorce would inevitably have followed such a disgrace whether it had been her fault or not. Such was the shame of rape . . .

  Perhaps she’d have finished with him anyhow. Safe and steady should have been his middle names and more than once she’d reminded him he was twenty-nine, like her, and not eighty-nine. Especially since his precious fridge magnet collection was growing apace and his father’s old brown Volvo had landed in his eager lap. Cruel? Yes, of course she was, but after the subtle and not-so-subtle humiliations meted out to her at Hellebore and then by James Benn, she’d grown cynical and suspicious. The opposite of the kind of daughter she’d once been. The woman she really wanted to be.

  Now badly burnt after a failed interview for promotion, then getting the sack for impulsively shoving some slush pile manuscripts into a tart’s hands outside the Hellebore office, she was beating a retreat. But her conscience was clear. For six years she’d worked her nuts off for pants pay and no recognition, and that surely was enough out of anyone’s life.

  Her late father’s gift of forty thousand pounds would be hers on her imminent thirtieth birthday, and this had spurred her into not only sending for the details of a promising looking property near Rhayader in rural mid-Wales, but also dipping into her meagre bank balance for the second-hand blue metallic 4 x 4 she’d just bought from a Balham garage.

  Survival, definitely. Reckless, maybe, but more and more she’d felt her future somehow inextricably woven into a past where strands of her childhood were already disintegrating and would be lost altogether if she didn’t act. And one of these lay on the seat beside her. Magical Tales from Magical Wales.

  She glanced down at the treasured childhood book lying on top of the Ordnance Survey map for Radnorshire and Griffiths Brothers Estate Agents letter confirming her appointment to view a house called Wern Goch at 3 p.m.. The cover depicted what had once been a luminous rainbow arching away towards green sheep-strewn hills, and although now faded, its symbolism remained as strong as ever. Because here she was, on the road, heading west towards that promised pot of gold.

  Another glance and a deft flick of the first few pages, seemed to make the past twenty years of her trying too hard, notching up all the conventional goals of life slip away. She was back once more in her old bedroom in Rusholme, sharing with her beloved father the treasure trove of exotic fables and their intricate and colourful illustrations. For despite his gruelling regime as an inner-city GP, Dr William Mitchell had always made time to enjoy with her, his only child, this mythical aspect of his favourite part of the world. A world so far removed from the one which was daily sapping his energy and, unbeknown to either her or her mother, straining his too-generous heart.

  She knew off by heart the sequence of double-spread paintings showing deep blue lakes edged by majestic forests and beyond these, wild uplands rugged against the blue sky. Next came snow-dusted peaks and lush, shady groves inhabited by gods and goddesses too beautiful to be ever human, she’d thought at the time. A long-haired Epona astride her horse, Blodeuwedd in a sunny flowery glade and the handsome Dagda with his sun-burnt skin, his tunic of feathers set against a sky full of twinkling stars. How in the mystical time between Beltaine and Samhain, the Queen of the Faeries rides out on her white horse and its tinkling bells can be heard through the night for miles around. How if you hide your face she will ride by, but look at her and she might choose you.

  Lucy smiled to herself despite the slow-moving traffic. How often had she’d dreamt of being “chosen” and taken away to an enchanted land? Every day of her life, it seemed. And what about the glossary of Welsh words at the end of the book? That particular list had soon subverted the compulsory bedtime prayer into a string of glistening jewels.

  arian = silver

  baban = baby

  cofio = remember . . .

  Yes, she remembered every single word, even now, and as she recited them while nudging her way through clogged-up Balham, they delivered a fresh conviction that this is what her father would have wanted not just for her, but himself. Even after death? Who could say?

  Stuck behind an unloading van on Trinity Road, she focused again on the cover, which the sun now mercilessly highlighted. Its corners worn bare over the years, its creator’s name, long rubbed away, while inside, these same details had been smothered by an Ex Libris sticker and forgotten. But not so the opening poem inside, framed by elaborate Celtic knots. This too, she knew off by heart.

  ‘O King of the Tree of Life,

  The blossoms on the branches are your people,

  The singing birds are your angels,

  The whispering breeze is your Spirit.’

  Each syllable spurred her on to put miles between not only that job which had sapped her spirit, but also the man who’d nearly destroyed her. Who’d caught her unawares at her desk only four days ago to whisper that she was looking lovelier than ever. Bastard.

  She was going too fast. Had to brake hard at traffic lights as she tried to erase his image from her mind. To dwell instead upon what today might have in store. The most important day in her life. Besides, wasn’t the notion of regeneration the very core of Celtic belief? she asked herself, setting off again. She only had to think of the forty pages beside her to realise that the hot grimy streets around her now represented a kind of birth canal and she’d soon be coming out the other side into a brighter, better world. The world the book had shown her, but this time instead of the ancient willow dwelling nestling beneath a gentle hill on page twenty-four, it would be Wern Goch on the Ravenstone estate. She’d already decided that the moment the Llandrindod estate agent’s email and various attachments about it had landed on her desk at work.
r />   The grainy photos showed a substantial Victorian house, which although in need of total modernisation, boasted three acres of land, bordered in part by the river Mellte. The agent, Lloyd Griffiths, had also waxed lyrical about what she could do with such productive pasture and informed her that the owner, a retired police officer from Cardiff CID, was looking for a quick cash sale.

  A mixture of excitement and alarm fuelled her journey towards the A40, because although Anna was backing her all the way in this scheme and promising to pass on some manuscripts for her to read once she was settled, her mother, still up in Manchester, was bound to be another matter altogether. This was why, so far, she’d been told nothing.

  With a full petrol tank Lucy headed west towards Wandsworth and the river, but roadworks meant a static half hour listening to Nelly Furtado with the day’s new sun on her face. So as not to get lost and waste time she pulled out her old A-to-Z and before she could access SW London, the pages opened on to Piccadilly where the site of Hellebore’s office lay under a blob of fluorescent marker. At the time, fresh from university and into a work experience placement, it had represented the sun in her universe. Her one big future, and seeing it now brought everything back into painfully clear focus.

  The road drilling ended only to be replaced by a massive dumper truck nudging out of a nearby side street. It was then, in the added wait, that she finally plucked up the courage to reach for her mobile and punch in her mother’s number.

  The one-sided conversation which had followed lingered in her mind like a hangover all the way to Oxford and then along the A40 towards Cheltenham where the sun finally succumbed to thick grey cloud moving in from the west.

  Damn the woman, she thought, snatching her sunglasses from her face and leaving them on the map in the vague hope they’d be needed again. Don’t the ones we love know just which buttons to press? Then a quieter, more insistent inner voice retaliated, but don’t they generally speak a truth we can’t bear to hear?