murmured, a stern, distant look in his brown eyes. And Daniel had remembered that once, earlier in Mick’s career, one of his fighters had died in the ring from a ruptured aneurism. Mick still sent Christmas cards to the widow, though twenty years had passed.
‘How will you know who she is?’ Mick had asked in the car, having insisted on driving Daniel to the airport.
‘She’ll be alone and she’ll be looking for someone.’
‘She might not be alone,’ Mick had said. ‘And everyone is looking for someone.’
Prophetic words, Daniel thought, walking through the streets, again struck by the age of the city.
Many of the buildings had obviously been sandblasted or repainted in recent times, and though most buildings were crumbling at the edges and grey with filth, on every street there was at least one building undergoing a facelift surrounded by a carapace of scaffolding and billowing plastic. He was startled when asphalt suddenly gave way to smooth, oyster-grey cobbles, but he made no effort to orientate himself using the map. He was beginning to become aware of a flow along the streets, like a hidden current.
He turned a corner and collided with a couple kissing languidly. They seemed oblivious to the impact. You didn’t see kissing like that back home, other than at the movies. Young people kissed in the street, but with defiant self-consciousness rather than passion. Not that Daniel knew too much about kissing or passion. He had kissed exactly three women in his life, and one of them had been a whore who had taken pity on his mortification over his youthful inadequacy.
The other boys had not believed his tale, claiming that prostitutes never kiss. Even now he did not know what to make of the fact that a prostitute had broken what seemed to be some sort of cardinal rule and kissed him, or what he had done to deserve it.
He passed through a square and there was a group of black men talking, dressed in expensive suits. They began laughing, flashing confident white teeth, and Daniel found himself wondering what it would be like at home if the Aboriginal men who drifted into town to drink and socialise in the park or the malls dressed in suits like that. There was something so crushed and battered about the old derelicts you saw drinking in the streets, no matter how aggressive or strident they might be about native title and the disputes it had caused in some Aboriginal communities.
Daniel walked for hours, his mind flicking back and forth between life on his parents’ farm and his current errand, as if it was trying to weave a tapestry connecting the two. It was only when he entered a street that showed him the sun low in the sky that he looked for his watch and realised he had left it in his room. Twice he asked the time of passersby before someone lifted a wrist to show him their watch face.
It was just past five, so Daniel reached for his map. It was gone; he must have dropped it. Fortunately he had noticed maps under glass at bus stops and busy intersections, but it was six o’clock before he found one that was readable and traced out a path from where he was to Grey Street, near the Sacré-Coeur Basilica. The sky had clouded over, and it seemed as if dusk would come sooner than seven. He walked swiftly, thinking there was something primitive about arranging a meeting at dusk.
The roads had grown busier than before, and people walked purposefully, their faces abstracted by end-of-day thoughts. Daniel found that no matter which way he walked or which side of the pavement he chose, he was moving against the flow of human traffic. Several times he had to step into a doorway to let a group of people pass before he could continue.
When he found that one of the doorways belonged to a small café, he realised he had not eaten for the entire day, though he felt no hunger.
He came to a great square pool of water in a mall. Several mechanical devices were spitting, stirring, ploughing or slashing the water.
‘You see that one?’ a woman told another woman in English. ‘I call it the jealousy machine. See how stupidly it threshes at the water; how ferociously it moves. Yet it goes nowhere.’
The words provoked the memory of a fight Daniel had seen between two Murri men in a camp far from towns and police. He had