Read an extract from Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane.
HOSTEL
(1995)
I’ve never told my husband this story, but I suppose I will eventually, on some sticky night in, say, February, as we lie naked in bed with the ceiling fan set at its highest speed. We’ll be waiting for a storm to bluster in from the south, and I’ll see the relevant part of him lying flushed and heavy against his thigh, and I’ll think about how I’d consider taking it in my mouth if the room were cooler by as little as two degrees. That will remind me of Roy and his wife, and I’ll feel like talking about them. And I’ll start by telling my husband that I used to know this couple who, on learning they were going to have a baby, began taking long walks together in the evening.
I might not use their real names. It would be hard, though, not to reveal Roy’s, which seemed almost to have shaped his personality. His given name— much to his embarrassment— was Royal, and, in defiance of his parents’ grandiosity, he’d cultivated an un-royal persona. He was a humble guy, selfeffacing. He lived his life—at least, his public, social life—as if he were answering a survey about it. If someone asked, ‘How was your trip to Fiji, Roy?’, his answer might be ‘I’d describe myself as having enjoyed it.’ The trouble was that he took his humility to such lengths that he actually came across, in the end, as kingly: detached, benevolent, devoid of individuality. His opinions and tastes and desires were as carefully bland as a king’s must be. A polite king, I mean, who coexists with a constitution, and whose irrelevance now and then sparks a complicated optimism about the possibility of a republic. Or, of course, a queen.
There’s no need to use Roy’s wife’s real name; in fact, she’s no longer his wife. I’ll call her Mandy. A name like this reveals nothing about her except, perhaps, that she was pretty and athletic. The evening walks were a response to Mandy’s fear that pregnancy might change her body. It’s not that Mandy was vain; she just liked to be good at everything she did. So she liked to be good at having a body.
At the time, Roy and Mandy lived in Newtown— which, I’ll explain to my husband, is a crowded inner-city Sydney neighbourhood that, back in the nineties, was grimy but beginning to gentrify. They were part of that gentrification: they’d bought a tall, Victorian terrace house in north Newtown and fitted it with many skylights, so that sunlight filtered down like incandescent smoke through the stairwells and woke them each morning from a gleaming square above their bed. You could sit on their guest toilet and see the undersides of aeroplanes. They’d added an extension, too, to open out the kitchen, and painted the front door an intrepid red, as if to advertise their plucky personalities. They were both lawyers with good salaries, and the timing of the pregnancy was part of a long-term plan that took into account the rising property values in their neighbourhood. Each night, they strolled hand in hand through the streets of Newtown, Mandy’s belly beginning to show, while Sydney Uni students rolled joints in the tiled front gardens of their share houses, and the employees of Thai restaurants ferried bags of fragrant rubbish out into narrow alleyways.
Sometimes Roy and Mandy walked down one particular street that had a backpacker hostel on it. The hostel was shabby and loud, but Roy and Mandy claimed to like it: they said it reminded them of their own student travels through Europe, of being nineteen and crawling into each other’s beds in crowded dorms. There was the time at a hostel on Mykonos when, apparently, Roy sat on a top bunk, his legs dangling while
Mandy stood between them sucking him off, and some raucous Croatian girls burst into the dorm. I heard Roy and Mandy tell this story multiple times, separately and together. Roy told it as if someone had informed him that, if he didn’t tell a slightly risqué story at least once every year or two, he’d be considered terminally unadventurous. Mandy told it with genuine relish, as if she were astonished at herself for living a life in which an incident like this had taken place. The details changed over the years; eventually, the girls’ nationality became Czech, and they ran from the room shouting, ‘God save the Queen!’
Roy and Mandy had had other backpacking adventures, but hasn’t every middle-class Australian? Weren’t we all at one time nineteen years old and sweet, oblivious amateurs? There was a night on the roof of a hostel in Marrakech that I’ve told my husband about; another in Penang, in a hotel full of Belgian doctors, that I haven’t; a full-moon party on Kuta Beach that explains the small scar beneath my left ear. Everywhere I travelled in the eighties, I found Australians in short shorts carrying treasured copies of Southeast Asia on a Shoestring. We all stank and thought we were poor, and none of the sex we had was interesting enough to talk about within two years of coming home. But Roy and Mandy continued to recount their escapades. They spoke with such partiality for their very young selves, as if they had somehow been especially sweet and especially amateurish, that I was always vaguely annoyed by their stories of those times.
The backpacker hostel in their gentrifying neighbourhood was made up of three connected terrace houses, leprous with pink paint and festooned with Tibetan prayer flags. It was being slowly devoured by one or more enormous night-blooming jasmines, which clotted the street with their creamy smell. No matter the time of day, there were always lights in the windows; there was always music playing and laundry hanging from the balconies. The street wasn’t well lit, and the hostel reared up so suddenly from the footpath and was so tall and bright that walking past it in the dark felt a little like being in a tugboat bumping along the edge of an ocean liner. The hostel was next to a park, which in turn was next to a church, and on warm nights backpackers usually occupied both the park and the churchyard in more or less furtive stages of drunkenness, sex, or both. In my experience, it was impossible to walk past that hostel without thinking of all the fumblings and unzippings of your own youth, the stubborn grass stains, the greedy crevices, the rueful grimaces when someone’s wrist seized up at an awkward angle. In the vicinity of that hostel, I’d remember even the most pedestrian local encounters as if they’d taken place in an impossibly remote country.
These are my own impressions, of course. I don’t really know how Mandy and Roy felt about the hostel, only that they walked past it one night and heard someone crying in the park next door. According to Roy, he knew at once that the person crying was a girl, but Mandy was less sure: there was a depth to the weeping that seemed masculine to her, or may even have been the growl of a possum. Anyway, something about the sound unsettled her enough that when Roy stopped walking, she squeezed his hand and shook her head, as if to say that they shouldn’t get involved. But Roy— noble, kingly Roy—squeezed back, gave a reassuring smile, and called out, ‘Hello? Hello? Is anybody there?’
The weeper took some time to emerge, but when she did she was a tall blonde girl in cut-off denim shorts and a baggy tie-dyed T-shirt. Apparently, she’d been crouching against the wall of the hostel, not far from the footpath but concealed by a bushy bottlebrush, and the first thing s Mandy noticed about her were that her braided hair was dotted with thin red fibres—the stamens of bottlebrush flowers—and that she was barefoot. When Roy told the story, he never mentioned what he’d first noticed about the girl. Mandy was always quick to say how pretty she was. I heard her compare the girl to assorted actresses, all of whom had been blonde in at least one major role but otherwise looked nothing alike.
The girl came sobbing up from the bottlebrush, wiping her nose with the back of her wrist. For several minutes, she was able only to apologise, and to weep. According to Roy, Mandy flew to the girl, took both her hands, and asked her what was wrong, while the girl just stood with her streaming face and her gulping mouth, saying, ‘Sorry.’
Roy asked if she was hurt, and I can imagine this— Roy stepping up to her and asking, gravely, ‘Would you describe yourself as having been hurt?’ There would be some urgency in his voice, but also some restraint, and the effect would be that of a member of the royal family pausing in a receiving line to speak to a retired Olympian.
The girl shook her head to say that no, she wasn’t hurt. Roy asked if there was anyone they could find for her— a friend? A boyfriend? Someone inside? Because it was obvious that she had come from the hostel: her fair hair was twisted in Balinese braids, her neck was noticeably dirty, and she seemed to cry with a European accent. The girl only shook her head again and cried louder.
‘Can we take you to your room? Can we get you anything?’ asked Mandy, asked Roy, and the whole time the little life they’d created together was floating inside Mandy, preparing itself to be part of the world.
But the girl didn’t want to go to her room, or to be brought anything. Mandy felt that there was nothing to do but to take the girl in her arms, so she did. This seemed to be the right thing: the girl collapsed against Mandy’s neck in relief and sorrow. Since they could get nothing more intelligible from her, Mandy and Roy decided to take her home with them.
It was one of those decisions a couple makes without discussion, but in full knowledge that they’re in agreement. Roy nodded, stepped away from Mandy and the girl, and gestured down the street; Mandy, with her arm around the girl’s shaking shoulders, led her away from the park and the hostel. The girl came without hesitation. Five minutes later, they were safe behind the red front door. Roy filled the kettle for tea and Mandy guided the girl to one of the chrome bar stools at the kitchen island. When she was shopping for the stools, Mandy had imagined her children sitting at them, crayons gripped in chunky fists while she made dinner. Roy, in Mandy’s vision, would arrive home from work, enter the kitchen rolling up his shirtsleeves, kiss everybody hello, and open a bottle of merlot. It would all be very ordinary, very lovely, and as she described the scene I could see it too, and the safety it represented: a safety I had always associated with Roy. In fact, I always found those stools perilous— and I spun back and forth on them many times, confessional and unhappy, my hands pushing off from the Corian countertop, while Roy leaned towards me over the island with a look of concern on his reassuring face. Mandy told me about the kids and crayons later, after the divorce, when they’d just sold the house and she was offering me the bar stools. I had no use for bar stools, but it seemed important to accept them.
So Mandy guided the girl to one of those stools, and this was the point at which they learned that the girl was Swiss and eighteen, but her name was unusual enough, or her accent heavy enough, that all they could be sure of was the letter it started with, ‘S’. She was no longer crying, although her body was still racked occasionally by dry, soundless sobs; in order to subdue these, she buried her chin against her chest in such a way that Roy and Mandy could see every bit of the wincing scalp exposed by her braids. She explained that she was backpacking around Asia and Australia with her boyfriend, Daniel his name brought a quaver to her voice, but she didn’t give in to it. She and Daniel had another six months of travel planned, and were due to leave Sydney in two days, hitchhiking to southern New South Wales, where they’d lined up a season of work picking fruit. After that, their plan was to head north to the Great Barrier Reef for a final, tropical hurrah, then return to Basel in time to start at university. S wanted to study psychology. Daniel was supposed to become a doctor. S looked sceptical at the idea of Daniel as a doctor, and the wry face she pulled made Roy and Mandy laugh. S joined in this laughter and relaxed visibly. She curled her bare feet around the legs of the stool, shook her tight, greasy braids behind her shoulders, and tugged at the neckline of her T-shirt as if to cool herself down. She wore a halter bikini top beneath the shirt— Roy and Mandy now noticed the withered bikini strings pressed into the back of her pinkish neck.
The whole sad story came out as she drank her tea: there had been a barbecue at the hostel that evening. Daniel had been drinking all afternoon, he was flirting with an Irish girl, had been flirting all week, and when the Irish girl sat in Daniel’s lap and S objected, Daniel made a joke at her expense— at S’s expense— and everyone at the barbecue had laughed. S told the story as if she saw, now, how trivial it must sound— but there was still dignity to the way she seemed to look back on it, with sorrow and wisdom, as if it had happened to a much younger person. Mandy and Roy, listening, must have thought of their passionate, brave young selves in those filthy backpacker hostels across Europe. They must have felt tender and protective towards S, and much older.
Now Mandy suggested that a glass of wine might be in order— something stronger than tea— although, naturally, she wouldn’t have any herself. (I can see the way she would have stroked her rounding stomach as she said this.) When Roy told the story, he always made it clear that the wine had been Mandy’s idea, that he would never have suggested it, and, of course, that he would never have drunk wine alone with the girl, who was after all only eighteen and in a vulnerable state. Mandy would nod in agreement as he said this. I once saw them tell the story while Mandy was breastfeeding, and she nodded so vehemently that the baby’s mouth detached from Mandy’s purple nipple.
So Roy opened a bottle of shiraz and he and the girl drank— only a glass or two each—as they all sat talking together in the kitchen. Mandy and Roy told stories of their travels and their university days; S talked about her parents, who had divorced a few years earlier and were both now seeing much older partners. It was as if, said S, the divorce had aged them; and she shook her head in wonder and disbelief, because she was at just the right age to start pitying her parents. They talked about the baby and somehow got around to looking at childhood photos of Roy and Mandy, and S said that if the baby was a girl they should name it after her. She was joking, of course, but the familiarity of this made it doubly impossible to ask for her name again.
Finally, Mandy yawned and said she thought it was time to get some sleep, and she suggested that Roy walk S back to the hostel— or, of course, S was very welcome to stay the night, although they had already converted the guest room into a nursery and she would need to sleep in the lounge room, on the couch, which folded out into a bed and was apparently fairly comfortable. I slept on that couch a few times myself— always heartbroken or drunk, usually both, absolutely sure that my life would never improve, that loneliness was everlasting, that no man with forearms like Roy’s would ever turn to me with love—and I can confirm that it was, indeed, fairly comfortable.
S, of course, chose to stay the night. Why do I say ‘of course’? I’m not sure— only that it’s so easy to imagine the intimacy of the three of them as they giggled at baby albums in that varnished kitchen, and how much nicer a stay in this pristine house must have seemed than a sheepish return to the hostel. Also, S said, she liked the idea of Daniel wondering where she was. She wanted him to suffer.
Roy made up the fold-out bed, as he’d done for me so many times, and told S to help herself to anything in the kitchen. Then he withdrew. Mandy found the girl some pyjamas and issued warnings about the delicate temperament of the downstairs shower; then she and S hugged in such a genuine way that Mandy, apparently, felt as if they were sisters.
At this point in the story, someone in Mandy and Roy’s audience would usually ask if it had occurred to them that the girl might rob them, and Mandy and Roy would always say no, absolutely not. And Mandy would say that she had only done what she hoped some stranger might one day do, if necessary, for her own daughter. When she said this, she would lean down to kiss the baby’s head; or she and Roy would look at each other as if to say, Don’t worry, we’ll never actually let her out of our sight—there will never be any need for the kindness of strangers.
Both Roy and Mandy always insisted that they’d felt perfectly safe with S in their house, and that they slept long and deep through the night. But surely Mandy must have spent some time, during that night, gazing at the dim square of the bedroom skylight and thinking about the girl sleeping in the lounge room, who had been so unabashed about changing that Mandy had seen her young, buoyant breasts. And Roy must have thought about how he’d gone around making sure the windows and doors were locked, and all the time there was a stranger inside the house with them, a girl who might have been anyone, whose name they didn’t even know.
I’ve also imagined them having giddy, hushed sex, knowing the girl was sleeping downstairs— of course I’ve imagined that, though I probably won’t mention it to my husband. And I’ve imagined the girl coming into their room in the early light, slipping into their bed with her long blonde limbs. Or maybe Mandy spent the night awake, rigid, waiting to see if Roy would get up as if to use the bathroom, say her name in a loud whisper and then, on receiving no response, creep trembling down the stairs towards the fold-out bed. I don’t know what it was really like, but I do know that every unhappy night I slept in that fairly comfortable bed, I wondered if Roy would come down those stairs. I listened for his step and thought at some length about what he would say or do, and how I’d respond.
When he didn’t come, not once, I cursed the effortless happiness of married people.
In the morning, the girl was gone. She’d stripped the bed, turned it back into a couch, drunk a mug of instant coffee, and left a note that said, Thank you very much, with very underlined three times. She signed it ‘S’. She hadn’t stolen or damaged anything, and had even closed the gate on her way out. I imagine the house feeling strangely empty that day, both Roy and Mandy looking in at the spotless nursery even more than usual, reminding themselves that they were awaiting a joyous arrival, not mourning a departure.
Mandy and Roy walked by the hostel again that night. They considered going in and asking after S, but because they didn’t know her name, they decided against it. Their baby was born three months later. She was the first of many babies of my acquaintance to be named Isabella.
When Isabella was a few weeks old, Mandy read a newspaper article about a couple of Swiss backpackers who had been picking fruit in southern New South Wales. At the end of the harvest, these backpackers had left for Sydney— they were planning to hitchhike— and hadn’t been heard from since. Their names were Daniel and Sabina. Mandy studied the photo of the couple in the newspaper. Sabina didn’t look like S, but she also didn’t not look like S. Mandy showed the picture to Roy, who agreed that she might have been S. Every time I heard them tell this story, they always looked a little apologetic at this point, as if they knew it would have been improved by a positive identification of S— but of course it had to be her, she was the right age, she was reported as being from Basel, her boyfriend’s name was Daniel, and, like S, the pair had spent time in Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia before their arrival in Australia. Sabina’s hair wasn’t in braids in the newspaper photo, which may have been why she looked different.
At first, Roy and Mandy ended their story here, with this ambiguous thrill.
The story was enriched a few months later when a group of mushroom foragers found Daniel and Sabina’s bodies in Barrow State Forest. They had been shot; Daniel had also been stabbed. Until then, I had never taken seriously the concept of evil. It was too abstract, I thought, and too convenient. Of course there was no power that moved in darkness through the world, recruiting some people and striking others. But I remember watching the news that day: the screen showed police tape across a bush track, officers walking with black labradors, helicopters hovering above treetops. Nothing graphic, but all of it horrifying: the tautness of the tape, the businesslike trot of the dogs, the way the crowns of the trees thrashed with the force of the helicopter blades. I felt the presence of something then, quite suddenly, in my stomach and at the roots of my hair. I watched the helicopters rise from the treetops as if hauling a vast net full of a heavy, invisible substance that seemed to want to drag them back down; but they broke away.
Isabella was nine months old when the bodies were found, able to sit up on her own in a tottering way. At barbecues and lunches and catch-ups and cafes, Roy and Mandy were asked to tell the story of S, the murdered girl who stayed the night. They always complied. As we leaned towards them to listen, I would look at Mandy, and at Roy, and at everyone else present, to see which of us might be willing to suggest that by being kind to S that night, Roy and Mandy had made her so trusting of Australian strangers that she might, for example, have been less careful if a man approached her on a highway, offering her a ride in his truck. Maybe no one else ever thought about this. Maybe only I pictured S on a lonely road with her tight braids and her boyfriend, backpack at her feet, one thumb raised, hoping for hospitality and thinking, when the white truck pulled up, that she had found it.
My husband, when I tell him about S, will recognise this part of the story, because Sabina and Daniel were only the first of the bodies found at Barrow State, and what came next— the capture of the man who had chosen his victims at random, the media circus, the trashy books and TV movies— was spread out like a wicked feast for anyone to pick at. But S was something private, a connection. She was Roy and Mandy’s. She was mine.
Years passed, despite the existence of evil. None of our friends would admit to being surprised when Roy and Mandy broke up, but I was. I had been so sure of the red door, the skylights, the way they looked at each other as they told the story of S. I had been sure that marriage to a man like Roy— so reliable, so benevolent— would be like stepping onto a throne from which there could be no abdication. But apparently, they had found themselves in different places, wanting different things. Isabella was just starting high school at the time. Property values in their neighbourhood were soaring and the house sold for a record price. Mandy inherited me in the divorce, but we lost touch when I married and moved out of state.
Yesterday, I was back in Sydney and ran into Roy on a street in Paddington. He looked good: older, leaner, like a man who would no longer talk about his backpacking days. There was no ring on his finger. He suggested a drink, and I liked the idea and was going to say yes. I wanted to ask him about the divorce, hoping he might say, ‘I wouldn’t describe myself as having enjoyed it.’ I wanted to hear the story of S one more time, as told by Roy. It felt as though this might be my last chance to get close to the largeness of life, its terror and mystery, while remaining perfectly safe.
And I wanted to ask if he’d ever thought about me as I lay in the fold-out bed. I already knew he’d thought about me, and I also knew that, if I did go for a drink with him, we would find ourselves in a bed together sooner or later. But as he stood with me in the street, his hand on my elbow, suggesting this drink, I was reminded of a member of the royal family showing concern for patients on a hospital visit. It hurt just to look at him. I still might have gone, but then I remembered that I was married now, and that married people are happy.
Highway 13
by Fiona McFarlane
A gripping, provocative work by one of our finest writers, the internationally acclaimed author Fiona McFarlane.
Comments