Virginia sidled up to us. “Here you are,” she said. She was wearing a man’s mirrored sunglasses, metal rimmed, oversized, and narrow trousers that showed how thin she had become. Maureen let me go and drifted away. “Why don’t you have a drink?” Virginia said, in an accusing way, as though she were scolding me for being so empty-handed.
I had been sober for several days after the kind of hangover that makes you think about giving up drinking, but I wasn’t that committed to the idea. She led me to the kitchen and elbowed people aside to get to the fridge, and pulled out a bottle of Riesling. “The wine out there is terrible,” she said, nodding toward the deck. “Someone brought a cask.” She pushed the fridge door closed. “Dad told me he’d run into you.”
I had gone to Circular Quay the day after I flew in to Sydney with the idea of riding a ferry to Manly, wanting to get out of the city as soon as I arrived, but the ferry to Birchgrove had been about to leave, and I gave in to the idea, knowing it would take me by her house. Fred was on his way home; he had seen me just a minute before his stop, and shook my hand for too long. He’d invited me to this party. “It will be really good to see you,” he’d said, beguilingly sincere, in that way he had of making you believe every commonplace he uttered.
I had thought about calling Virginia or sending her a message letting her know I would be there, but didn’t. The last e-mail had been two years earlier, and she hadn’t written back. It had been one of those e-mails I read the day after with another one of those hangovers and found it hard to remember actually writing, and regretted sending. I had written things that I probably shouldn’t have, and I gave myself a hard time about it for a while, and wrote an apology and then deleted it. I heard that she went through with it, got married, and I wrote another message congratulating her and deleted that too. There had been others composed and trashed since then, most recently in the weeks before I decided to come back.
She pushed the wine bottle into my hand and I followed her upstairs to her old bedroom. The smell in the hallway was the same: the piney scent of Radox bath salts, a note of mildew from the water, the dusty smell of the carpet. Her room had a small balcony and we sat there on wooden boards hot from the day’s sun. She had collected a couple of glasses on the way and held one out for me to fill. I hadn’t seen Julian. I felt sure that he wasn’t here, although I knew that this was just me projecting what I wanted to be true. But then she swallowed a big mouthful of her drink and gestured loosely toward the balcony doors, to the room inside. “I’m back here for the moment,” she said, and I looked back inside and saw what I hadn’t noticed, the thing she was explaining. The bed half made, the clothes draped on the armchair, and things strewn on the dresser, a lipstick, a book. “Julian’s away for work. I hate being at the flat on my own.”
Someone at the party on the deck below shrieked with laughter, probably Maureen, and there was the sound of glass breaking. Virginia pushed the sunglasses up the bridge of her nose.
“So, tell me about London. What the fuck are you doing back home?”
I started to tell her a bit about it, leaving out the reasons for returning.
“Virginia?” Skye was standing in the doorway of the bedroom. “Mum asked me to get you. Speech time.”
“Are you making a speech?” I asked.
“No,” Virginia said. “Maureen.”
Maureen was tapping a champagne flute with a fork when we arrived downstairs. It seemed rude to leave, so I stayed, standing at the back of the crowd. There was singing and toasts, a cake, a huge pavlova. I looked for Virginia, wanting to say goodbye. Fred pulled me aside and handed me a bottle of beer and a paper plate with a slice of pavlova on it. Strawberries drowned in clots of meringue and cream.
“There you go,” he said. “Pavlova and beer in hand, water view, you’re back in Sydney alright.” He smelled of beer and expensive aftershave, a perfumer’s idea of the beach. “You found Virginia?”
I said that I had.
“She’s moved back in for a while,” Fred told me. “Doing some renovations on that flat of theirs.”
I nodded at what was obviously a lie.
“You were friends with Julian, right?” He used the past tense, and I thought it was probably because the friendship was in the past, but it made it sound as though Julian himself was in the past, as though he were dead. The idea didn’t bother me as much as it should have. “Heard any news of him?” he asked, and took a long swig of his beer, looking away from me.
“No, I haven’t been back that long.” The idea of a conversation with Fred about Virginia’s relationship was about as appealing as the thought of a swim in the polluted waters of the harbor below. But I felt sorry for Fred, who seemed to be on the verge of saying something more, a worried expression on his face. “What’s the story?” I asked.
“It’s been five weeks,” he said. “No word from him. He and Virginia were having some trouble I think, but nothing serious. And then.” He lifted his hands as though describing an explosion. “Nothing.”
“He took off?”
“No phone call, nothing. Not answering his phone or e-mail, Facebook, whatever. No offense, I know the two of you had your falling out. I just thought you might have heard something. If you’re still, ah, in touch with that old crowd. Virginia’s just, she’s been wrecked by it.” I thought of the cool way she had adjusted her glasses, the way she drank her wine. She didn’t seem wrecked. But she was good at hiding things.
“Was he still working for you?” I asked.
“Yes. Left me in the lurch a bit with a couple of things.” He waved as though brushing away a mosquito. “But that’s neither here nor there.”
“I’m not in touch with that old crowd, not that much,” I said, using his words. The crowd of dealers and users that had been a big reason to leave Sydney before I found myself arrested or worse. Julian had been part of it, but it always seemed like a part-time interest for him, a hobby. His uncle was a judge. His father was a solicitor, with a house in Cremorne that made Fred’s look like a boat shed. Julian was just passing time before entering that kind of life; they would have bailed him out if any kind of serious trouble had loomed, or spirited him away to dry out if his habit got out of control. Which it never seemed to do. When he started working for Fred, I thought he had taken that step into the world of money and privilege. That happened just after he started seeing Virginia. Or just after he started seeing her publicly. I found out later that before she broke up with me, she had been sleeping with him for months. It was hard to muster any concern for Julian.
It had been me who had introduced him to Virginia, when I brought him along to a party at the Dawsons’ one weekend. He was the new kid at school in our final year, arriving with rumors that he had been expelled from two others. Parents loved him, with his easy, disarming smile, his apparent lack of teenage angst, his guileless charm, his storybook name. I fell for it myself, but I was disappointed in Virginia when she fell for it too.
“Was he in any trouble?” I asked. Maybe he hadn’t left the old crowd after all.
I expected Fred to say no and I think he was about to. But he said, “I’ve started to wonder.”
I hadn’t tasted my beer and it was impossible to eat the pavlova while holding it. I looked for a place to put both of them down before I left.
“His parents have been to the police.” Fred shook his head. “It’s not like him to disappear like that.” He seemed to be wounded on his own behalf as much as Virginia’s. Julian was easy to love, and Fred was someone who loved people easily. “I’m used to seeing you with your camera in hand,” he said, changing the subject. “You know Derek, don’t you? Derek March? He’s here somewhere.”