deborahb

Hey, hi, how you been? What’ve you been up to? Me? No, just busy, is all. But I’m hoping to get away soon-ish. Do you tweet?

As an early birthday present, I scored an invitation to be part of the fabulous Poe’s Deadly Daughters blog this weekend (this weekend in Canada, which is a few hours behind the Sydney weekend). The awesome Sharon Wildwind made me think really hard about everything the Australian landscape has ever meant to me (namely: something horrible) after some comments I made on a WFC panel some years back. People have largely ignored me when I’ve complained about the creepiness of the landscape before, so this is a great leap forward.

Lemme know what you think.

Coming down the escalator at Greenwood Plaza, the long one, at the end of a long day — concentration dead, eyes heavy, brain fritzing randomly — I saw from the corner of my eye a woman two metres down the escalator from me, turned to her left and gazing intently into the eyes of her neighbour. Intently. Like the world didn’t exist. Like the old-fashioned symbol for pisces, two figures in rapt reflection.

As I said, concentration not working, eyes not much working either, so both took their time digesting what was in front of me. But the brain, fritzing randomly, kept spitting up a message about the woman and her female neighbour. It kept saying, ‘no no no’ and then ‘not unless her neighbour is moving down the escalator by moving THROUGH THE WALL’.

Which is about when I realised: to the left of the woman was not a neighbour but a mirror.

“I have a story to tell, but if I tell it, they’ll kill me.”

“Who will?” I ask, compulsively. Because even sober I’d want to know the answer to that.

“When I was 18, I was beaten by six screws. I was naked. Neddy Smith asked me if I’d screamed.”

My thoughts settle into the shape of a quiet ‘wtf’.

“Did you?” I ask.

“Wouldn’t you?” he says.

“Think Neddy would’ve screamed?” I ask.

“He likes to think he’s tougher,” says the man, “but I reckon.”

Neddy Smith. Famous murderer. As Sydney as the Harbour Bridge. Serving a life sentence (since 1989, I learn later). The TV show of Neddy’s life was banned in his home state of NSW for years.

And this guy — a stranger, a man who’d stopped us in the dark street not because he needed directions, as I’d thought, but because he had a story to tell — this man was claiming he knew Neddy-fucking-Smith?

My boyfriend is with me, taking up a reassuring amount of room to my right. Otherwise I might not have stopped. The stranger smells clean, really clean. His aftershave lingers hours after where he touched my arm to get my attention. Not that he needed to. He was too convincing already. Him and the tatts that lined his arms.

“I walk to Darling Harbour and talk to myself the whole way there,” he says. “People think I’m crazy, but it’s only the book.”

“You should write that book,” I recommend.

“But they’ll kill me,” says the man.

He says it without fear. Only a cheerful certainty. I know there’s a solution to this, but I can’t think what it is. I’m still sobering up.

“You should at least write it down. Or record it,” I try.

But shit, if he’s right and the cops are crooked, more crooked than we even realised, then where do you safely stow a record of that?

“You should post it to someone,” I suggest. “The Herald.”

He thinks my recommendations are dumb but he’s too polite to say. It’s nine-thirty at night and I’m not awake and I’m not sober, but I know I’m not going to stop him talking. Even if I wanted to, which I don’t.

He says, “You know Roger Rogerson.”

With a kind of of-course-you-do tone.

Of course I do. Rogerson haunts my neighbourhood even now, the corrupt cop that shot dead drug dealer Lanfranchi just a few streets from where the stranger is accosting us now, on a spot strangely marked with an X in old sandstone. (No one knows where the mark came from. Well, someone knows. But they haven’t said. Even Rogerson wonders: “In the old sandstone gutter where Lanfranchi fell dead someone has scratched an X“. Now that X features in a Nick Stathopolous painting destined to hang in my loungeroom. Roger Rogerson. Who’s survived long enough to comment on the stories they tell about him, the legends they’ve made about him).

The stranger’s off on another tangent and I’m having trouble keeping up.

“We used to go to that pub there on Broadway, you know the biker pub?” says the stranger.

There’s no biker pub on Broadway: what he’s pointing at is a student-style cheap and cheerful cafe where you can get jugs of sangria with your bowl of chips and gravy. But still I believe him.

“Sally Ann Huckstepp used to live in that house right there, and we’d go to the Broadway,” he says, pointing at one of the terraces sunk below street level, a modest hovel. “I’m sixty now, but when I was twelve, Neddy Smith introduced me to Huckstepp and do you know what he said?”

“What’d he say?”

“He said I was a good kid.”

Neddy Fucking Smith said that? Quick, what were the years Neddy Smith terrorised Sydney? I’m trying to remember.

“What year was that, when you were twelve?” I ask instead.

“Let’s see,” says the stranger, ever the obliging host on the streets of my city. “I was born in 51, so that was…”

He hesitates, unable to complete the maths.

“Sixty-three?” I suggest.

“Should I clear his name?” asks the stranger, “Because I can. For the family. Wouldn’t they want to know he wasn’t a rapist?”

I’ve lost track of who he’s talking about again. Someone accused of raping Sally Ann Huckstepp. She’s famous in her own right in Sydney, largely for turning up dead in a pond in Hyde Park. Went out to meet someone. Never came home. Ratted on her criminal friends to the cops. Knew she was going to die. That’s what they say about Huckstepp.

“I know who really killed her,” says the stranger, following my thoughts. “One’s on a life sentence, one’s dead, and there’s me.”

And there’s me. If all of this is true, if any of it is, for god’s sake how do we get this guy to tell the story? Does he mean he killed Sally Ann? Or is he talking about someone else again?

“You’re carrying drugs,” he suggests to me.

“Er, no,” I say, “but okay.”

“You’ve got drugs in your handbag, right,” he says, not noting the fact I don’t have a handbag, “and your boyfriend’s with you before the fact and after the fact, see?”

He outlines some strange archaic law about before and after the fact, which is hardly ever incited but by which he could prove someone guilty and that’s why he’s in danger, see? Because he can prove it and if he does, they’ll kill him. I mean, if he’s right about the story, sounds like he’s right to be paranoid. There’s an internal logic to what he says that I’m finding inescapable. But the premise of the story, now that I’m not sure of.

Neddy Smith, I later learn, has Parkinson’s now & has asked for compassionate leave from his sentence. He’s been refused. People don’t want Neddy Smith out on the street again. I smell the stranger’s aftershave and look at the thick lines of tatts on his right arm. I wonder about the Broadway. Am I really that close to history?

“You should write that book,” I say again.

We walk away and the boyfriend says, “Wow, we should invite that guy around for a cup of tea.”

“Didn’t he say he’s one of the three that killed … someone?”

Sally Ann? I’m growing even more confused, the protective spell of his internal logic wearing off as he beats his path to Darling Harbour.

“He’s sixty,” argues the boyfriend.

“He’s real,” I say.

Six o’clock in the morning, that’s what my roomie said. Didn’t understand what he meant.

He was right.

Much excitement at chateau deborahb this morning, but not the good kind. Turns out we had a break-in last night while we were sleeping. And before anyone feels TOO sorry for me, I have to confess that all I lost was a window (400 bucks, thank you very much) & whatever peace of mind I had left before the event.

Good thing for us (note: sarcasm) we live a reasonably dodgy part of Sydney. There’s a long history of break-ins in my area. Muggings, too. A couple home invasions, but that was one time and years ago.

About six years back my neighbour was robbed. Five times in six weeks. Including one time AFTER getting himself the expensive alarm system (they still took his son’s iPod, but they left in a hurry & as far as I know, they haven’t been back). Three doors up we have a house that once sported a sign by the front door that read ‘we have not replaced the stuff you stole last time, please stop breaking into our house’. Years ago someone slipped a broom handle through an open window & took my handbag. They took the whole five bucks & then dropped the handbag — complete with its credit cards — by my back door. Probably figured I needed it more than they did.

The next day I realised every single window had a handprint on its outside.

You get used to the idea you’re being haunted, that strangers are slipping by your outside walls. You form a relationship with your would-be tormenters. You start to swap stories about ‘the guy’s dead eyes’ and ‘the one in the footy shoes so he could climb fences’. You don’t know their names & they don’t care about yours.

I only know all this because I’m in one of those reasonably dodgy neighbourhoods, the kind that bring neighbours together. We watch out for each other. We don’t necessarily like each other. But unlike the thieves that swarm our borders, we respect each other’s rights to space, security, privacy.

One day I found a chewed apple core sitting neatly on the edge of a concrete flowerpot in the back yard. Had someone really climbed my back fence to eat an apple in my backyard in the sun & then left me the core like they were leaving a message? It wasn’t rubbish: they hadn’t discarded it. It was placed delicately on the rim of the pot. For months I wondered what they were trying to say.

Repeat offenders. That’s what we get around here. Teenage junkies, mostly (a local politician once told me off the record that when heroin supplies in Sydney increased, so did petty crimes). Part of the reason I often say ‘junkies!’ with such contempt. Fucked up, soul-spent drifters, heading nowhere, taking our handbags/iPods/laptops with them.

I have a sense I’m waiting for the other shoe to fall.

Because I still can’t find anything missing. Thing is, with this kinda neighbourhood history we’re slightly more security conscious than the average person. Consequently we have the whole bars-on-windows thing going on & we have — the thing that saved us last night — a locked door between the less secure back-of-house & the space where we keep all our stealable stuff. The junkies’ side of the locked door gives them access to the laundry, bathroom & kitchen. Finding the door locked it looks as though they worked backwards through the house opening every kitchen cupboard & bathroom drawer & leaving them open. That’s what I saw when I unlocked the internal door this morning: every kitchen cupboard door hanging open. All I could think of, for several seconds, was ‘Sixth Sense”.

“Were they hungry?” one cop joked later.
“I thought we were being haunted,” I replied, but she didn’t understand me.

There’s been a spate of it recently, they told us. All over the area — including last night 2 doors up where my relatively new neighbour (in this neighbourhood you’re new if you’ve been here less than 10 years) called emergency at 3am, hearing someone in her house. In her case, they got her handbag with her wallet, phone, iPod, all the good stuff that’s a pain in the neck to replace. Thank god for that internal door, I kept thinking (selfishly).

The cops told me the junkies might not bother returning. Maybe they’ll pass up our place for the easier pickings. Or maybe ‘they’ll come back with a crowbar for that door’. My boyfriend tried to argue logically why they wouldn’t, logically why it made sense not to bother trying it again. Logically, logically… he doesn’t have the history with the local junkies that I do. Or the contempt. He thinks they’ll stop trying when it gets too hard. He doesn’t realise they often don’t stop. They don’t have the sense to stop. They don’t know where they’re going. They often end up in a place you wouldn’t expect them.

Me, my brain has switched to that cold rationality that I call ‘Terminator mode’. I’m now assessing my house again, wondering where they’ll try next, where I should be strengthening my defences. Fuck those junkies, for my $400 worth of new window. Fuck them for filling my head with the illogical image of me on my loungeroom floor, slowly beating a junkie to death.

But I figure what I’ll do rather than waste my energy on life’s disenfranchised is go up to my new neighbour two doors up & invite her over for a cup of tea & a history of the local ‘colourful identities’, the ones that have no names, who have a habit of turning up again & again. The ones who don’t think they need an invitation.