We drove past the shrine today. I was sitting in the passenger
seat, closest to the side of the street that she had walked, and so I was the first
to see the flowers. The blockades of blooms spilled out from the stoop of the
shop that had caught her last moments on camera. Candles flickered in the last
few breaths of the storm that had threatened to spoil the Big Game. Strangers stood,
legs apart, heads bowed, hands clasped together in silent prayer. The Channel
Ten camera crew; a man untangling long black cables.
I saw all of it, at once; it was a streak of unfamiliar colour
on a backdrop that I knew so well. I was prepared to feel upset, and maybe even
angry.
What I was not prepared for was an influx of raw emotion. A slew of feelings
without names, that came on as fast as we had driven past the scene. Some of the roots were easy enough to identify; the brutality, the unjust ending of a life.
The thoughts of the husband, of the mother and father. The friends and family living
overseas and around the corner, nursing holes in their hearts and fistfuls of
unanswered questions.
But there was something
else that tugged at me, that still tugs at me. A feeling of...of. A feeling very close to dread, but not quite
as palpable. A lingering.
Was it because she was women of my mid to late twenties age
bracket? And that being a woman, and in that particular age bracket, had seemed
to amplify her vulnerability? Was it the sometimes subtle, sometimes not so
subtle inclinations of the media, suggesting that because of the hour of the
morning, her physical appearance and her intoxicated state, she had unknowingly
facilitated her own abduction?
Or was it simpler than that. Was it just because she had chosen
to walk?
She had walked. She had left the pub that my friend Anne had
once chosen as the perfect place for us to see her off to South East Asia. She
had walked past the Blythe St intersection, home of the Blythe St share house
that I had frequented when my friends from university had lived there. A house
that I had walked to from the tram stop on Sydney Road, sometimes in the dark,
and often alone, clutching a Biology text book in one hand and a cask of wine
in the other.
She had walked past the Turkish restaurant that I had eaten at the week before.
The pub that I had got drunk and danced at until two in the morning the night
after, to celebrate my Lovely’s birthday; the day before the posters had gone
up on the tram stop shelters and the
telephone poles, before people had made Facebook groups and implemented
hashtags.
I've always been a little scared of the unknown, but right now it isn't the unknown that's scaring me the most. It's the
knowing. It is knowing that if it were me, I would have walked it. If I had
been out drinking with my work friends at the Bar Etiquette on a Friday night, and
I had being living in the Brunswick/Coburg area, I wouldn’t have even given it
a second thought. Hell, I’ve walked it before! What would have been different
this time? What would have been the reason for me not to? There’s nothing out
there, lurking in the residential darkness of driveways and backyards and
poorly lit side streets, that could be worse than the things I have thought up
in my own head! I’m always looking for stories in places where there aren’t any
stories to tell.
I would have walked it.
And I have walked it since, but only in the day time. And I know that there
will come a time when I will have to face it in the dark, and that I will have
to decide; is it worth it to risk my life on a few hundred meters? Is it
worth the fourteen dollar cab fare, the four minutes of awkward conversation,
and the chance that I might accidentally leave my phone in the back seat?
If you were to ask me now, of course I would say no. But what about next week?
Next month? Next year? Can I trust myself to remember what this feels like? To remember that, despite all my pride and femenist sensibilities, women will always come off as the preferred target?
I think I know what this feeling is. This burning in the hollow of my throat,
the hollow space below my heart. It is the knowledge that I am not invincible. My
life could be snuffed out as easily as the candles that now burn in memory of
hers, beneath the Irish flag buntings on the steps of the church where loved
ones and neighbours and strangers now gather to grieve. It is knowing that there
doesn’t always have to be a pattern; no plot points or character arcs or a
conclusion that might lead to understanding, or in the least allude to it. And
that there will be no big reveal. There’s not even an answer, yet, to the
simplest question; the one that everyone has asked at least once, if not one
hundred times. Why did this happen?
It is the feeling of knowing that death is not a spell that
can be broken. That monsters live and breathe and walk on the same streets that
we do. That I do. That she did.
This is not a good story. This is not even a bad story. It
is just a horrible thing, and it need not have happened to anyone. But it could
have happened to me.
 |
| Rest In Peace |
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