****
The night was still and dead. They held hands. At the Archibald fountain in Hyde Park, there stood an elderly bald man in a fluorescent yellow jacket, examining weeds in the garden bed. Sean imagined that the man was a park ranger or some sort of council official. Water shot from the bronze bust of a tortoise and splashed into the torpor of effluent around the statue of Apollo. Rachel did not break step.
“Run!” she whispered to Sean.
She broke into a fast trot and Sean followed with her. They shot past the old man in fluro green vest and down the Grevillia-lined path toward Elizabeth Street. In the night, Mahogany Swamp Trees sat side by side with Morton Bay Figs, still and ancient and unmoved by everything around them.
“Keep on running!”
“I am!” he puffed back at her.
Apart from them and the ranger, the park was empty. Their shoes slapped on the bricks of the pavement. He wondered how much longer she could continue running.
“Ok, stop!” she barked out.
In an approximation of normalcy they slowed and walked at a fast pace. She pulled up her hot pink Levis with her free hand.
“My pants were falling down.”
She sucked in a deep breath and sighed. He didn’t know if she was talking about during or after when they had been running like lunatics.
It was quarter past nine in the evening. As Rachel had been informed that the party was to begin at nine o’clock, by her estimations they were running extremely late. She didn’t know where they had to go and told him she needed his phone.
“Hey Leena! Where is the party again?” She looked at Sean. “Where are we?”
He shrugged, not sure of the street name. She saw a Ticketmaster office.
“We’re at Ticketmaster! Where are you again? Where’s Jackson’s on George? Oh, yeah.”
Park Street was desolate. At the end of the intersection, the spire of Town Hall jutted into view, lit in a yellow hue. In the last few days, Christmas decorations had started to sporadically appear outside hotels and shop fronts. It was not uncommon to sight tinsel wrapped around the checkouts in late-night supermarkets, ungainly festive bunting suspended from cords over intersections, and the windows of David Jones and Myers filled with animatronics dressed as Santa Claus and his reindeer and collected elves, and all other manner of supernatural sprites.
“We have to get to George Street,” she told him.
He pointed in the direction of the Town Hall. “It’s really close.”
“Leena, we’re really close! Yep, I’ll see you soon. Bye. Bye.”
Rachel crossed at the intersection on George. To their left was the Town Hall and they walked alongside the massive, blank walls of the Queen Victoria Building.
From the first time he had been in Sydney, four years ago, the QVB had always stood out to Sean. He had never been able to figure out the appeal to the building. While the Queen Victoria Building had been designed in mind as a twin to the grandeur of the ancient Town Hall, it was marked by a number of slight entranceways. It had always struck him as garish in design and limited in potential, and ultimately was an overpriced and hackneyed and meaningless centrepiece of the city, superficially designed as a tribute to an older time that had never actually been.
However, tonight, the QVB, in a strange sort of way, with its name-sake homage to an archaic Monarch now irrelevant to modern Australia, dated ersatz Victorian architecture, clock tower, labyrinth stairwells, zinc domes and sandstone facades, plus stained glass murals and an overabundance of not necessarily better, but regardless expensive, shopping, seemed to match the feel of the more commercial interests of Christmas, and gave the building its own place of meaning and a reason for being. Sean looked at the shut, locked front gates, glad that they couldn’t go inside and considered this thought.
As they continued past the QVB and down towards the west end of the city, he noticed how quiet Rachel had become. He stopped walking and scanned the empty intersection and waited to gain her attention.
“Are you coming?”
“Hey, are we going the right way?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t we need to be on George Street?”
“Yeah.”
“But that’s George Street?”
“What?”
“That’s George Street.”
“Where the fuck are we going!”
“I don’t know where you are going, but that’s George.”
He pointed.
She turned but not before snapping at him. “You better fucking know where it is!”
She stomped back toward George Street. He inhaled and mentally counted to ten. He noted a street sign. He tried to affect a soft voice.
“See, George.”
“Where is it!”
“I… think… we have to turn left.”
“I can’t see Jackson’s!”
“Isn’t the place close to the Quay?”
“I don’t know!”
“Darling, I’m pretty sure the party is down that way.”
They walked in silence with Sean a half step behind her. Occasionally she would query if they were going the right way, he would reply that they only had a little way to go. He really didn’t want to be with her or to go to her friend’s party. He didn’t want Leena to meet him. So far, all of Rachel’s friends whom he had come in contact with were anything but. These friends were either strangers, or men that she had grown a fleeting attachment with and had fucked a couple of times.
“I might ignore you tonight.”
She sat out front in the alfresco smoking area at Jackson’s. He handed her a glass of orange juice. Heat lamps buzzed overhead, unnecessary in the humidity of the evening. The windows had been left open and the front bar would have been no more than a foot away. He sipped from a tall glass and placed the drink on the table.
“What is that?”
“Jack Daniels and lemonade.”
She looked at the colour of the mix, not entirely convinced.
“Try some.”
He made a sly scan of the entrance. She held the glass to her mouth, and drank with a quizzical look.
“Is that really Jack Daniels?”
“The lemonade hides the taste, eh? But you have to serve it in a tall glass.”
“I need your phone again.”
He pointed at the mobile on the table and stood up, waiting for their chance.
“Hi Leena, are you at the pub? I’m here too!”
She looked over her shoulder.
“We have to wait to get in. Who am I with? I’m with –”
She stared up at him, completely lost for words. He returned her gaze. She waited. A long moment passed. He smirked.
“Sean.”
“I’m with Sean,” she meekly informed Leena. “Ok, I’ll see you soon.”
She motioned to him. A group of women, all in their mid-twenties, had arrived at the velvet rope. The two bouncers standing at the front entrance prompted the group for ID. The women searched in their handbags and purses. While the security was distracted, Sean and Rachel snuck past them and into the bar proper.
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