Your Vestige
In an hour there will be a knock on my door and I will hold your mother’s hand —
7:oo PM
I call you for the third time but you do not answer. Bitch. I mutter. And I turn from the window on the eastern side of the house. I shut the blinds to the setting sun, trace a finger across where my breath had fogged the glass. I throw my phone onto the bed. I crumple. I weep. Tears rolling down — down — down like racing raindrops toward the windowsill.
In an hour they will release the posters. In an hour my phone will shriek like a klaxon — in shrill spiralling notes without beginning or end. There will be lights that dash across the Eastside in red and blue and blinding white. In an hour there will be a knock on my door and I will hold your mother’s hand in the small alcove beside the living-room. Like a wounded animal she will cry and howl into my chest and I will imagine your face superimposed upon hers. I will hear your name. Irma. Irma. Irma. Like a chant or a persistent afterthought — Irma. Muttered from street to street. Carried on the low-blowing southwesterly wind — you will drift past Flinders’ Lane and out — toward the harbour. I will call your number again. I will call you but you are not here. In an hour, they will find you phone tucked neatly beside your violin, next to that old polariod photo — of the camping trip to the Grampians, your eyes flickering with dim firelight — which I took for you.
When I told you to burn it — you giggled. You snatched it away.
‘Not while I’m here’ — you exclaim, triumphant.
But you are not here.
8:oo PM
First there came constables. A tight-faced magistrate with badges and papers. She asks me for details. I have none. She asks me for data: where we last were, what we last ate, when we last talked. Standard procedure— she informs.
Now she asks me about you and I fall apart. There is an ocean beneath my eyes. In a haze, I speak — about the calls and your Bach performance at Spring Concert and that camping trip. When I raise me head again, she would have long since gone on to other witnesses. They have lost interest.
Then there are students. I do not catch their names though we wear the same uniforms. Unknowable. They enter and leave in a procession. I clutch the cracked screen of my phone close to my chest, for fear that your face might make your mother cry.
Irma D. — missing since 7:oo PM on the second last day of the month. For any information please contact — . Irma D — if you have seen her since 7:oo PM tonight, please report immediately to the Docklands. Irma D. — if you are in danger, do not be afraid — we will find you.
They have your phone now. They try to override it but the screen does not light. Sabotage! I dare not speculate more. They pass it to me. The magistrate asks me for the password. I breathe in.
Now your mother turns to me with bloodied, questioning eyes. They take her to the adjoining room. Let us resume from where we left. The magistrate unscrews her pen. I watch the sharp nib scratch and break the skin of the page. I clutch your phone as I would cradle your body. There are no miracles. It does not warm to my touch.
It remains a black mirror. A little onyx tablet of oblivion, smeared with fingermarks and rippling with faces. They peel off the case for inspection. They take your violin too. It’s my turn to steal away the half-burnt photograph. Soon they will take your face with them — every last visage — not that you have one anymore.
The constables and the magistrate have gone, your mother limping after them. The house is empty. My heart is empty. If I scream, there will be a threefold echo — at least these walls might still reply.
9:ooPM
I am cocooned in layers. I wait on the platform like a butterfly for spring. My left hand pocketing your photograph, my eyes fixed on the dark tunnel. I brace for the whoosh and the flicker as the night train swoops into station. The crowd surges past as the doors slowly open. They scurry. They tumble and scuffle. They scowl as I sunder their course like a watershed parting the waves. One woman curses me beneath her breath. They relent and let me pass.
The cabin reminds me of a surgical room. Under blue light, the railings appeared as scalpels and saws for the dissection. Eyes following eyes. Your face now plastered on the bulletin. Irma D. — missing since…But that girl is not you. Your poster-eyes plant a seed of doubt deep into my chest — where it roots and saps my warmth. It blooms and withers and dies. A little flower of anxiety shakes its head in the wind and geminates. My mind is a storm of petals — I pull out your photograph intermittently. I remind myself where I am. Richmond. Flinders. Southern Cross. Flagstaff.
I remind myself of you. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Dark humour. I dredge your social media for any signs or secret languages. The reels play on loop — your boyfriend beside you, your laughing eyes and close-cut dress, the shot glasses in the background table. The frame shakes. I’m not sure if I was drunk when I took it. The boyfriend has been silent. He has not seen my messages.
Now my thoughts race headlong into the dark — the train roars as it enters the tunnel — both blazing toward a single point of light — toward improbably probable hypotheses. What if — you can hear me all along. What if — you are running. What if you want to cry out, but your tongue is tied. The train squeals and pulls to Melbourne Central. I inch closer to the windows of the door.
As if on cue the frigid blast of night air infuses my coat, my boots. Into every orifice it slithers and condenses. I sharpen. My lungs open to the cold. I breathe a fine mist that sparkles and disperses in the vapor lamps. I unbutton. I loosen my hair. I erupt from the cocoon of the cabin. I fly.
1o:oo PM
Everywhere there are eyes watching — from the storefront windows, from the restaurant tables and from unseen alleys and nooks and cracks in the wall. Myriad eyes on high and low. Refracting the light. Throwing oblique shadows across my face. Glamour models beam at me from couture houses — from Valencia and Hermès and Chanel. But I do not see.
Like Io I am hounded by the unblinking wraith of Argus. I cannot cease. I swim beside the neon-streaming cars. Gondolas aboard a river of light. I hear your name through the wail of sirens and clamour of feet. Irma. Irma. Irma. They pass me onward. Saints and angels with their clarions. I am a winged beast — hurtling down from the highstreet and into the pedestrian tumult.
But I have forgotten your face in the fury. I roost beside the arches of Solemn St. Paul’s. I reach for the photograph that had brown away in ecstacy. Gone. Your face melting into the lights and into the crowds intermingling. One woman takes your nose, another your brows and lips. You will be torn apart by their apathy — can’t they see? I cannot find you — if I cannot see you anymore.
The flame in my heart subsides and is replaced with stone. The cold stings my hand and my cheeks turn raw. I could press myself agains the wall and petrify. Become one of the hundred guardian-statues etched in the arches. A grotesque gargoyle with sleepless vigil.
A dash of red and blue breaks the facade and I jerk up — Irma? But there is only an ambulance at the crossroads, its light shared and fractally dilated in the thousands of glimmering surfaces at Flinders. In a flash it goes — my face briefly illumined. I try to anchor myself in that light. Brushing away the blear, I renew my vision and plunge into the dark and roving masses.
11:ooPM
There are few girls that still walk the street. Those who do keep their eyes in the shadow. I see men with horns and goatish legs. They are merry folk. They keep each other in pleasant company. The windows tremble with the sounds of glass against wood. Of live telly and cigar-smoke. I catch the game-show host as he soliloquises into the radio -
“What does the ‘SIM’ in ‘SIM Card’ stand for?”
The peculiar men laugh and I shudder at the sound. They empty out into the street, their gait all wobbling and lilting from the drink. Little horns and big horns in shades of ebon. Hair overgrown with ivy.
“What does the ‘SIM’ in. — ” and the radio squeals in horrible static. “I’ll go again: what does”
And now they walk beside me — do you know what it means? I keep quiet and they laugh again. There comes the shudder. They trot a few steps behind. I stop and so do they. I turn to ask if they have heard of you. That girl in the posters. That girl on the news.
One of the satyrs gives me a wink. He compliments your dark eyes. Your dark hair. But he does not know you. He does not say any more. He rejoins the gaggle. Irma — they whisper — like a mystical chant it passes from ear to ear. Irma D. — missing.
As if they share an equanimous and universal secret that I do not. Some kind of gleeful denial-of-arms. A subliminal joke. I hiss and move onward. Past the loitering lines of revellers toward the bridge in the distance. The show host finds his voice, but I am too far to hear clearly.
“What does the ‘SIM’ in the — card stand for?”
“What does — stand for? — the ‘SIM’ — ?”
“What does ‘SIN’ stand for?”
But I do not know.
Midnight:
Irma. I whisper your name like a prayer. Irma — where have you gone.
The bridge is mostly empty. Save the harmless vagrant man with the box of chalk. His marks are clear and indelible. They wash away his murals in the morning. In the remains of the day they bleed into the grains of the pavement and become distorted.
Cars barely stop now. They leave a river of light in their wake. Swirling sound into waves. Engines bellowing into the bitter cold.
I trace the chalk-pictures on the ground — a great colourful fresco of meaningless dust. All off-whites and reds and purples and oily greens. Like rotten fruit. Like battered corpses. I follow his scrawl across the pavement. I stumble. I hold a hand to my throat so I do not puke.
The image of a giant red waratah blooms across the asphalt — almost maroon under the lamps. Red petals splayed out and heaped in piles. The remnants of the Southbank lights seep into the river far beneath. Flashes of brilliant yellow and white tussling across waves. As if the black water bled ichoric gold.
I kneel. I let my hidden fears run wild. You are dead. You are dreaming. Your eyes are glassy and your tongue is cut. Where is your bag? Where is your mind? You are splayed on the sidewalk, you hair spiders outward in tousles. You bloom red like poppies along the Acheron, awaiting the departed souls to pick at your petals. Shhhhhh — Hush. You won’t hurt anymore.
Tomorrow they will scour the city and every backstreet. But you would have gone. Your only vestige — crimson in the moment, furling under my boots — scrubbed away to nothing.
Longhand — 30/Aug/’24 — 3:16AM. From sudden inspiration surrounding a missing girl “Emma” whose details were widely spread across socials. Inspired by a number of missing student cases in the past five months.
May there be hope for those in need of solace. Blessings ~
