I don’t know what I expected; upheavals, with horses eating human flesh and the earth opening up and a sky full of fire and all that stuff? I don’t know. But I suppose you’d like to think that if you were going to just disappear like that there’d be something other than just a pair of white thongs to indicate that something weird had happened.
—
One other thing about all these early articles on the missing swimmer. Many of them were illustrated with the same photograph of Matt. It was a picture that was taken at some work function or other and he looked buttoned up and on his best behaviour, well-built and if not handsome at least regular-featured enough not to be unattractive. He was the type who would certainly have been noticed, especially at the Prahran pool which was, I knew from experience, exactly the place where men noticed other men.
And as I looked at the photo of him, all pixellated the closer I got to it, I became sure that I had also seen him that day at the pool, doing what I couldn’t remember, but just like those other strangers at the pool, I too was sure I had seen Matt Gray.
—
When I first came back to Melbourne from Spain I got a taxi to the address my sister had given me in the Docklands, to Sharon’s Place. I felt like shit, jetlagged and miserable and my stomach and bowels felt horrible.
I got the key from the caretaker’s office and went up and went pretty much straight to the bathroom where I shat and showered, then found the bedroom and went to sleep. For the first few days, that’s pretty much what I did. I had an amazing appetite for hot showers (even though it was hot) and for sleep. Food I ordered in, or just didn’t eat at all. My life, when I thought about it at all during those days, seemed crap, but so solidly and consistently crap that it was, in a way, not as upsetting as it could have been. I mean, when things seem thoroughly bad, they’re the times you think, Oh, well, it’s not as if I can salvage anything here, and you quite happily have another drink and just wallow in it and, I think the phrase is, ‘give up’. That’s how I felt. Jetlagged. Numb. Hot showers and sleep and a dumb feeling that it was better not to think about anything was all I could manage.
Anyway, I remember, it must have been three or four days into this, I woke up and had no idea what time it was or what day, or whether it was even day or night. There was, I could see, a bit of light seeping in around the edges of the curtains but it was very dim and dusky. It was obviously, I thought, either sunrise or sunset, but I had no idea which. I went to the bedroom curtains to open them and check where the sun was. The whole sky was this dark brown colour. I could see where the sun was, this washed out, smudgy, round bit of lighter brown almost directly above. It must have been about one o’clock in the afternoon or something, but it was like a total-sky eclipse in brown. I opened the window a notch and you could smell the air, hot and thick with wood smoke. It didn’t make a single bit of sense to me until I turned on the news and found out that bushfires had been burning in the east of the state for days. On one hand the browned-out sky was ominous and scary, which seemed perfectly appropriate given my mood at the time and the unholy crappiness of my life, but on the other hand I also didn’t give a shit. I just closed the curtains and went back to bed. But you get my point, I think. At least I had the horses eating human flesh, yeah? Matt Gray got a perfect blue sky.
2
In the days immediately following the disappearance I was back at the pool, just as I had been in the days prior to the disappearance. There were a string of hot days just after Matt went missing and so there was a relatively thick smattering of patrons at the pool each day, but one day blended into the next during that time.
The packet-of-crumpets woman was often there. And one day Red Trunks made an appearance. I watched him walk from the changerooms to the end of the pool. His bum was so lovely, each cheek bulging as he walked, left right left right left right. His thighs were big and wobbly, the muscles were there somewhere, but loose like a swimmer’s, not tight like a runner or a bike rider or a body builder. I decided I liked his thighs almost as much as his bum.
I lay down on my stomach, turned my head, closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of the Prahran pool. There was the sound of water constantly flowing as the pool spilled over into the filtration system, and splashing of course, but surprisingly the loudest noise was the sound of children screaming. Close your eyes and it’s quite disconcerting.
It would soon be New Year’s Eve and there were a number of poofs at the pool topping up their tan for the big night out. A little gaggle of them closest to me were talking about what tickets they’d got and whose place they were getting ready at, but amazingly I heard no mention of the missing swimmer. In fact, in those few hot days that melted into each other, everything seemed exactly the same as it had been the day before Matt Gray went missing, which was somehow a bit disappointing and kind of horrible.
The whole thing had grabbed my interest, I admit, but in the way that other summer pastimes do. Like Sudoku or crosswords or books written especially to be read on the beach. Things to pass the time when passing the time is all you have to do.
Lazy and hot, various things about Matt drifted through my mind like they were carried past on a conveyor belt, steadily slipping past the viewfinder before I could properly grasp them or think about them in any detail.
Then sweat dribbled down and tickled my ribs. A sign I was officially too hot to think. Bliss.
—
When I got back to Sharon’s Place that day there was a message from my sister on the answering machine. She hoped that everything was OK and that I had to call her. Notice that, I HAD to call her. That was so her. So I called her mobile, hoping for the voicemail, but she answered.
‘Hello.’
‘I’m just calling you to let you know I’m OK,’ I said. ‘But I’m not going to talk about anything.’
‘Well hello and thank you to you too, you little shit. Are you sure you’re OK?’
‘Yes I’m sure.’
‘You’re wallowing. I can tell.’
‘Like a pig in shit.’
‘OK. Call me again soon.’
—
You know, I think if you’re going to disappear, either from a pool or up your own arse, the time between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is the time to do it.
When Ava Gardner came to Melbourne to do that film On The Beach, she apparently said something like, ‘Melbourne’s a great place to do a film about the end of the world.’ It’s one of those moments in Melbourne’s history that everyone knows, like Jean Shrimpton wearing a miniskirt to the Melbourne cup, or Picasso’s Weeping Woman turning up in a locker in Spencer Street Station. I think Ava got it right, personally. There’s a scene in On The Beach where Ava and her co-star, whatever his name is, walk down a Melbourne street and there are empty cars in a motley arrangement all over the streets and there’s not a soul around. This is the end of the world as we know it; this is Melbourne between Christmas and New Year. There’s little traffic and hardly anyone in the streets. Everyone’s either holidaying elsewhere, or staying indoors because it’s so hot and everything’s closed anyhow.
It’s the kind of feeling that can conk you on the back of the head if you’re not careful, especially if you don’t have family and friends around you to bicker with as a distraction. It’s the kind of time when someone who’s come back to town with fresh wounds can creep into a stranger’s porny apartment to lick them (the wounds not the stranger) without telling anyone he’s even there, and who might just possibly, well might just possibly not make it.
Just before I left Barcelona I booked into a ritzy hotel I couldn’t afford and proceeded