A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists Read online

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry. For one, three dollars.’

  ‘Will you take two dollars?’

  ‘Sorry, no, dear. Perhaps I can manage two seventy.’

  Caddy looked around the stall. Among the cosmetics and kitchenware she saw a small bag of instant oats and two Cheesesticks. ‘What if I take these as well?’ She picked the food up.

  ‘For all three, five dollars.’

  ‘I don’t have five dollars. Can you take three? Everyone is shutting up, it’s getting hot. There’ll be no one else around till this evening. Three?’

  ‘I’ll take three fifty.’

  Caddy counted out three fifty. She had eighty cents left now. That meant drinking boiled river water and walking everywhere until she could find Ray. Maybe that soldier would be good for a twenty, or even something quick for ten dollars. Damn. ‘Here you go. Thank you.’

  ‘Do you want a bag, miss? You can have it for only 50 cents more.’ She held up a torn plastic bag, probably discarded by someone on their way out of Woolworths.

  ‘Thank you, no. I have my pack.’

  ‘You enjoy that soap, now. It’ll make you smell pretty. Come back for more when it’s gone. I have my own olive tree. I’m always here.’

  Caddy smiled and turned away, then remembered. ‘Excuse me, but do you know if any trains have gone by today?’

  ‘Trains! Why is everyone talking about trains today? Thuy has been telling everyone she saw a train this morning,’ she nodded towards an empty stall. ‘I don’t think it’s so special to see a train. There were trains all the time when I first got here – at least four a day.’

  ‘Um, thanks. Maybe I’ll go see if any more are coming.’

  Caddy wandered through the last of the stalls and past the glass sliding doors that led into the Woolies. Behind the security guards, she could see a toddler standing by a trolley, experimentally licking the shiny stainless steel. ‘Hope you’re enjoying the air-con, kid,’ she thought. She took the underpass beneath the train tracks and walked up the ramp to the city platform. People were living on the platform, but no one was waiting for a train. She felt uncomfortable. She was in someone’s house, waiting for a train that everyone knew would never come. They must think she was crazy.

  ‘What the hell,’ she said under her breath. ‘Too hot to walk.’ And she pressed the green button on the station intercom.

  The cracked, stentorian voice left a suitably dramatic pause and began. ‘Trains departing platform one are the 11.17 Flinders Street, now expected at 2.45. We apologise for any inconvenience.’

  Two forty-five! She looked at her watch. It was already nearly ten to one. Only two hours to wait! What were the chances? She grinned stupidly and looked around to see if anyone else had heard.

  ‘Two hours, huh?’ An Afghani woman, scarf wrapped around her head, looked up from the pot she was stirring. ‘Not bad. Haven’t seen someone up here actually catch a train for about three weeks now. You got lucky!’

  Caddy swaggered a little. ‘Sometimes you just got to take a chance. Mind if I sit in the shade over there?’

  ‘You go ahead, girl. Can I get you a Coola cordial? It’s just river water, but it’s not bad.’

  ‘Thank you so much, that’s very generous of you!’

  ‘Well, we don’t get guests up here so much. Can you stir this for me for a minute?’

  The woman rose from her squat and handed Caddy the wooden spoon while she ducked into the waiting room her family had converted to a home. A minute later and she was back with a plastic cup full of body-temperature green cordial.

  ‘You enjoy that. Got to stay hydrated. Take it over in the shade there, no hurry.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Caddy took her cordial and her pack down the platform to a patch of shade along the ticket office wall. She took her pack off and lowered herself carefully on to the asphalt, holding her cup steady, then leaned back against the wall. She took a sip.

  ‘Awesome.’ She knew it was ridiculous, but a bubble of joy rose up in her as she stretched her legs out and took another sip. No money, almost no chance of getting more, nothing but crap to eat and a long wait for a train that would probably never come, but hey. She kind of felt almost normal. She was at the station, waiting for the train, like she’d done with Harry when they’d first been together; waiting for a train to go to the footy, or a movie. Except not quite like that.

  ‘Harry. Oh.’ Damn. She blew her cheeks out, pushed the air out of her lungs. Shook her head a little, had another mouthful of cordial. ‘OK, come on.’

  She pulled her pack towards her and unzipped the top pocket, took out her notebook and pen.

  She’d been writing this story for a few weeks now. It was pretty much completely imaginary, just stuff she’d dreamed up about things that wouldn’t ever happen. It was about two kids, Simon and Sarah, traveling around America. For a while she’d had a book called Lonely Planet USA, from 2009, which had described a lot of the landscapes and towns. Most of the photos had been torn out, but there was one page left with a picture that said it was ‘Half Dome, Yosemite National Park’, which she’d particularly liked, and on its back a photo of ‘Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco’ and ‘The Castro, San Francisco.’ So she was writing a story that happened in some of those places, that was about motels and road trips, famous landmarks, forests and canyons and mountains. It was about these two kids whose parents had left them the task of trying to see all of America. Dead parents, kids who didn’t really know what they were doing, but knew it was serious, that they had a job to do. The bits about them never having any money and having to sleep in all kinds of stupid places were the easiest to write. She read back over the last thing she’d written:

  We’ve been doing this now for three years. Well, longer, I guess, if you count the time before his dad died, but three years now on our own. I lost interest a long time ago, to be honest, but Simon, I don’t know, I guess he feels like this is something he has to do for his dad, and I guess I have nothing better to do. Where would I go? Simon is all the family I have. Not just all the family; all the anything.

  ‘Are you awake, Sarah?’she wrote.

  My parents named me after a pet rat they had, back when they had a house. She always seemed to be writing about people who used to live somewhere, and about rats and cockroaches.

  I don’t know why they named that rat Sarah. When I asked mum, she said it was just a good name for a rat: Sarah.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You want to go get some groceries? I thought maybe we could pack up this stuff and go get some groceries.’

  ‘Like, oat bars?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Yeah, OK. We could mark off the area over by the Woolworths.’

  This wasn’t working. Everything she wrote just seemed like it was about her. She closed her notebook, closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wall. She missed Harry.

  ‘Everyone misses someone, Caroline,’ she said out loud. She looked down at her watch. Fifty minutes to go. She polished off the last of the cordial and pulled herself up off the ground.

  ‘Argh.’ She’d stiffened up. Her hips ached. Thirty-three was too young to feel bad just from sitting down for an hour. She stretched a bit, tried to work the soreness out, but it seemed settled in.

  She walked back down the length of the platform. The woman wasn’t cooking anymore, so Caddy poked her head into the old waiting room. She was asleep in there, a child curled up by her back. Caddy put the cup down gently by the door.

  The shade had begun to stretch away from where she’d been sitting, down towards the city end of the platform. She walked a little, stretching her muscles and passing the time. At the far end of the platform she leaned over the fence, looked idly at the street below. Nothing much happening down there; it was the middle of the day and far too hot for sensible people to be out and about. In a laneway between the buildings two men in broad sunhats were lifting a body out of the street. It looked like it’d been a man, mayb
e in his fifties or sixties. No real way to tell. They backed through a doorway in one of the buildings, and she wondered where they were taking it. The body had left a stain on the cobblestones, a black, person-shaped patch. ‘At least you left your mark on the world,’ she said to herself, then felt mean. Even the stain would be gone soon. She lent double over the fence, pushing the metal into her belly, and sighed. Somewhere, she thought, there’s someone who isn’t bored out of their mind. She jammed her feet against the fence and lent back, stretching her arms out full, her bum almost touching the asphalt.

  ‘Bored!’ she yelled. ‘Oh, sorry!’ quieter this time, remembering the sleeping child. But no one came out of the waiting room.

  THE CREEPIEST SCAMMERS

  ‘Attention platform one. The next train to depart will be the 11.17 Flinders St, stopping all stations to Flinders St. Please remember to touch on before traveling.’

  Caddy looked at her watch. Two forty-five on the dot. Let no one say the trains were unreliable.

  The door beeped and she pulled the handle to slide it back. ‘Thanks!’ she called back to the Afghani woman, emerging from her tented home to watch the train.

  ‘Enjoy your trip,’ she called back, reaching over to pick up the plastic cup by her door.

  ‘Train now departing. Please stand clear.’

  Caddy stepped inside and the door slid closed behind her. There was nowhere to sit – the carriage had been almost entirely converted into homes for the thirty or so people who lived life permanently on the rails. She sat on the floor just inside the door, leaning her back against the divider that made a little alcove round the doorway. It had been months, maybe a year, since she’d managed to catch a train.

  ‘This is the Flinders Street train, stopping all stations to Flinders Street,’ the driver announced over the PA.

  ‘Next stop North Melbourne, change at North Melbourne for Sunbury, Upfield, Williamstown and Werribee services.’

  Williamstown had been her train once. The Williamstown and Werribee tracks must have turned to liquid somewhere around Yarraville station, she thought. Someone should tell the driver to change the script.

  At North Melbourne she saw a few straggling hopefuls wandering the platforms. It was a good place to wait for a train: three lines (or five, if you believed the driver) passed through here. But no one got on her train. She wondered if any of them were hoping to get out to Broadmeadows. She’d heard there was land out there, places you could grow food and have a little space around you. But it was probably just the name; probably false advertising.

  The train pulled out of North Melbourne; ‘Train now departing, please stand clear.’

  ‘This is a City Loop train, stopping all stations to Flinders Street. Next stop Flagstaff.’

  The City Loop had always made her nervous. Since she was small they’d been warning her about the dangers of trains, and for some reason she’d always thought if a thing was to go wrong it would go wrong in the tunnels of the City Loop. When a thing goes wrong in a tunnel and you’re trapped in blackness, that’s a serious wrong-going.

  Weirdly, when things finally had gone wrong it hadn’t been as anyone had predicted. She was seventeen when terrorists took out the Sandringham line, bombing stations at Balaclava, Gardenvale and Brighton Beach, way out in the southern suburbs and well clear of the City Loop. No one much had even been hurt; almost anyone who lived along the Sandringham line had given up on a train ever doing the trip and had gotten themselves a bike, even way back in 2014. She’d heard it was some kind of protest, not terrorists at all, but that was clearly nonsense.

  These days, navigating the smeared platforms and dismantled escalators of the City Loop settlement stations was a much bigger worry than terrorists. Thousands of people lived in the three underground stations, with no water, no ventilation and no one clearing anything away, ever. Elsewhere in the city settlements took care of themselves, kept things clean, looked out for each other. But for some reason the City Loop had attracted the worst down-on-their luck transients, the most mentally ill, the creepiest scammers, the fallen-from-favour cops and bouncers, tough guys and reprobates always assuming someone else would clean up after them, never doing a thing for themselves.

  But all that was potentially hours away. Right now, the train had stopped at the entrance to the Loop tunnel. There’d been no word from the driver and it didn’t look like anyone was expecting one. Delays didn’t matter to anyone else on the train.

  ‘Power failure’, a boy of about thirteen slid out from his nest under one of the seats. ‘You need to pee?’

  He pulled a crowbar out after him, and jimmied open the doors. Jumping down to the tracks, he propped the doors open with the bar. ‘Don’t move that, OK?’ he said to her. Casually, he strolled over to the side of the tracks – he didn’t even look to see if another train was coming – and relieved himself into the pepper trees.

  ‘Excuse me.’ A woman holding a toddler of around two stepped over the crowbar and down to the tracks, followed the boy to the culvert and encouraged her child to go to the toilet. Meanwhile, the boy had pulled a rag from his pocket and wrapped it around his hand and was now plucking the fruits off some of the prickly pears growing by the side of the tracks.

  The doors began to beep, and pushed themselves on to the crowbar, trying to close.

  ‘Train now departing, please stand clear.’

  The beeping continued, the doors thudding up against the crowbar, over and over.

  ‘Yeah, don’t get your knickers in a knot,’ the boy called.

  He helped the woman pick up her toddler and they both strolled back to the train, pulled themselves up over the crowbar and let the doors slide closed.

  ‘Train now departing, stand clear please. Our next station is Flagstaff.’

  Caddy settled back against the divider and closed her eyes.

  THE ROAD WAS SOFT

  When her house, husband and cat were vaporized, Caddy didn’t just get sad, she got poor. Caddy and Harry had been clinging to the bottom rung of the middle class: he worked for rich people, putting up marquees for their endless garden parties, race meets, weddings and expos; she was a freelance writer, spicing up content on finance and insurance websites. Her laptop, internet connection, office wear and second income all went in the fire, along with her will to live.

  So these days she mostly relied on Ray.

  Caddy had gotten through Library station without incident, jumped the barriers and taken the exit out to Swanston. Through the plexiglass she could see people shopping in the mall, a burly guy in head-to-toe black guarding the one barrier that lead from the station to the shops, asking people for tickets. There was nowhere to get a ticket anymore.

  She’d followed Lanh’s instructions and found the doorway on Drewery Lane. The door was open, so she’d left the boxes inside, trying to disguise them a little by pushing them under a chair. She stepped back into the street. The boxes were completely obvious to any casual passerby. She couldn’t just leave them there, could she?

  It was quarter to four, still plenty of time before she was due to meet Ray (who probably wouldn’t show up). She went back inside, picked up the boxes and started climbing the stairs. It was only a small flight, turning one corner to a light door of woven rattan. She coughed loudly. Nothing happened. She pushed the door, which swung open easily, and peered inside. It looked like a bar; brown bottles – bottles! – of beer lined up along a high shelf, little cushioned booths and antique lamps. Light streamed in from a ceiling-to-floor window at the far end. Why wasn’t there anyone here?

  She jumped. Listened again. Something had snored. She tipped her head towards the sound. Another small snore. She stared harder into the room, looking all around. The third snore was louder, coming from behind the bar. Caddy stood on tiptoes and then, when she still couldn’t see, took those tiptoes carefully forward, craning her neck for an extra half a centimetre of height.

  It was a bulldog, a British bulldog, curled up behind the ba
r. She smiled. Then she stopped smiling, and got nervous instead. You can leave the door unlocked if you have a good guard dog. She placed the boxes quietly on top of the bar and backed her way out, ran down the stairs and pulled the front door closed behind her.

  In the bleak sunshine outside, Caddy missed her sunglasses again. She stepped into the crush of Swanston – the sidewalk market stalls and card games, the beggars, the endless dust thrown up by the surge of motorbikes and four-wheel-drives – and peered through the glare to the other side of the street. She couldn’t see Ray. It was only four fifteen. She was really hungry and she had 80 cents left. Between the shoe repairers and barbers, the woman pouring a litre bottle of Coke into little plastic bags, tying them tight and displaying them on her folding table, she found a teenage girl grilling pigeons.

  ‘How much for a leg?’

  ‘One dollar.’

  Sometimes Caddy just didn’t have the energy for it all.

  ‘You know one dollar is ridiculous, can you just tell me the real price?’

  ‘One dollar, miss.’

  ‘Oh, come ON!’

  ‘30 cents, miss.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll have one leg please. Here.’ Caddy counted out three 10 cent pieces onto the table and took the leg the girl tore off one of the roasted birds.

  It was pretty good, actually. Might have been worth a dollar. She stood in the shade of the buildings and polished it off, then steeled herself to cross the road.

  The traffic lights changed and everyone just kept right on driving through. She wasn’t sure why the city hadn’t got around to disconnecting the lights to save power. She waited until the traffic was mostly motorcycles and stepped off the kerb. The road was soft, and she recoiled. She hadn’t bothered looking down before, but now she did. There was a body in the gutter, probably someone hit earlier in the day. She looked around. No one was interested. A man was picking through a hill of rubbish piled up against the corner of a nearby building. She called to him, ‘Hey! Hey!’A few people turned around, but none of them was him. She walked over.