The Greenwich Apartments by Peter Corris

Author:Peter Corris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 1986-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

12

IT had been a long time since any fun had been had in that house, if you don’t count cockroaches. There was a thick film of dust over everything—furniture, books, crockery, glassware. The place looked as if it had been left suddenly, one busy morning maybe, and had never been returned to. The covers on the double bed in the larger of the two bedrooms had been quickly pulled up. A single bed in the other room had been used as a linen store—sheets and clothes, roughly folded, were stacked on it. A man’s clothes and a woman’s, like those in the drawers and wardrobe of the other bedroom.

Dishes had been washed at the sink and left to drain. Dust settling on them when wet had formed a sludge that was now a thin layer of dried mud. It was an uncanny and uncomfortable feeling to go through the drawers and cupboards collecting papers and other scraps of the lives that had been lived here. The clothes were the firmest evidence: blue shirts, dark trousers, plain shoes. There were holes where a badge had been pinned. Among the man’s clothes there was also some beach gear and summer wear. I found a camera and light meter but no photographs. The woman’s clothes were the kind Tania Bourke would have worn when she wasn’t strutting her stuff in the city—still well-made, still man-attracting, but with some concessions to a relaxed life in the lower heels and more casual styles.

As the flat in the Greenwich Apartments had contained more of the woman’s things, this held more of the man’s. The paperbacks tended to be of the hairy-chested variety, Robert Ruark and co. There was a small collection of the sort of thing that had been contraband in Australia until the Whitlam enlightenment—Lady Chatterley, Portnoy, Henry Miller etc. Joe Agnew must have been assiduous in his duties, or perhaps the boys divided the confiscated hot stuff at the pub after work.

I worked through the house thoroughly as the light dimmed outside. The electricity and gas were connected. The water ran rusty, the colour of weak tea. In the end I could probably have filled another garbage bag with Agnew’s and Bourke’s significant effects. I could certainly have proved that the same two people had occupied this house and flat one at the Greenwich Apartments. Some newspapers and magazines indicated activity later than in the other place, up to about a year ago. Unusually for that sort of house, the front door had a letter slot. Mail had built up inside the door like an Aboriginal midden. Most of it was unsolicited junk, none of it was revealing, personal, or intimate, but receipted power bills indicated that someone was paying the way in a place where no-one lived. Again.

‘Where have you gone?’ I said to myself aloud. The sound of my own voice startled me. I was in the living room which was almost dark. I switched on the light and heard a scurrying behind the couch against the wall.

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