Blue Lake by David Sornig

Author:David Sornig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS054000, BIO002000, SOC015000, HIS004000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2018-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

22

COMMON DESECRATIONS

I’ve been sitting in a viewing booth at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image’s Mediatheque all morning, watching the newsreel of the burning of the pile of pianos in a slow loop, frame by frame. After I’m done, I head to my regular restaurant-bar in Little Lonsdale Street. I eat lunch there with my brother. I don’t have a great appetite for food, but I drink wine — one glass, two. I find myself making excuses for drinking. I say it’s something about the dizziness of the newsreel, watching the three minutes of it over and again for an hour, that has made me feel this way. My shackles have been loosened by the wine, and once lunch is over, I find myself heading east along Little Lonsdale Street, enlivened by the prospect of closing in on the topography of Elsie’s crumbling life.

I end up in the front bar of the Elms Family Hotel on Little Lonsdale Street’s corner with Spring Street. As the oldest continuously operated pub in Melbourne, and given Elsie’s history in the area — her nearby arrests, her suicide attempt in 1928 — I have imagined the Elms as somewhere Elsie is likely to have spent time drinking. But the bar has all the character of a plaster-ceilinged 1970s schoolroom, or the back-storage room of an office I once worked in during the 1990s. It is featureless and depressing. It has nothing to do with the 1920s.

As one drink becomes two, and two, four, I overhear the barman talking with one of the two other customers in the place. He’s telling the patron about Elliot Perlman’s novel The Street Sweeper. I didn’t particularly like the book and I can’t let the opportunity to give my opinion pass by. I nudge my way into the conversation, and the barman shows me his copy of The Street Sweeper and refreshes my memory of the plot, telling me how much his wife loved it and how much he’s enjoying it. As I listen to him, I can’t remember that I didn’t like it. Instead, I remember just the opposite.

When I leave the bar, I’m slur-brained and end up meandering through the laneways off Little Lonsdale Street, looking for a trace of the kind of shabby, sordid house I have been trying to imagine Elsie into. But all along I can’t help thinking about Elliot Perlman. I’ve convinced myself that, by lurking in a laneway, by navigating my way along the lines of association into and out of the Zone, I’ll be able to risk a drink and sing a song with the real Elsie Williams; that Jack Peacock will emerge from a rubbish tip, scowling at me to nick off; that Lauder Rogge will peek out through the boards from the cabin of the John Hunt to see me walking along the unsealed road toward him, the dogs barking already. I’ve convinced myself that I can see the whole thing, inside and out. That these names will

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