—
Like Penelope, he also came from far away, but it was a place in this place, where the streets were hot and wide, and the land was yellow and dry. Around it, a wilderness of low scrub and gum trees stood close by, and the people sloped and slouched; they lived in constant states of sweat.
Most of what it had, it had one:
One primary school, one high school.
One river, one doctor.
One Chinese restaurant, one supermarket.
And four pubs.
At the far end of town, a church hung in the air, and the people simmered inside it: men in suits, women in flower-patterned dresses, kids in shirts, shorts, and buttons, all dying to take their shoes off.
As for the Murderer, when he was a boy he wanted to be a typist, like his mother. She’d worked for the town’s one doctor and spent her days punching away in the surgery, on the old Remington, bullet-grey. Sometimes she took it home with her, too, to write letters, and a
sked her son to carry it. “Here, show us your muscles,” she’d tell him. “Can you help with the ol’ TW?” The boy smiled as he lugged it away.
Her glasses were receptionist-red.
Her body was plump at the desk.
She had a prim voice, and her collars were stout and starched. Around her, patients sat with their sweat and their hats, their sweat and printed flowers, their sweat and sniffling children; they sat with their sweat in their laps. They listened to Adelle Dunbar’s jabs and left hooks, as she worked that typewriter into a corner. Patient for patient, old Dr. Weinrauch emerged, like the pitchforked farmer in that painting American Gothic, then beamed to them, every time. “Who’s next on the chopping block, Adelle?”
Out of habit, she looked at her chart. “That’d be Mrs. Elder,” and whoever it was—whether a limping woman with a bum thyroid, a pub-drenched old man with a pickled liver, or a scab-kneed kid with a mystery rash in his pants—they each rose and sweated their way in, they lodged their various complaints…and sitting amongst the lot of them, on the floor, was the secretary’s young boy. On the threadbare carpet, he built towers, he careered through countless comic books, and their crimes and chaos and kapows. He warded off the scowls of each freckle-faced tormentor from school, and flew spaceships around the waiting room: a giant, miniature solar system, in a giant, miniature town.
* * *
—
The town was called Featherton, though it was no more bird-like than any other place. Certainly, since he lived on Miller Street, near the river, his bedroom was filled—at least during times of rain—with the sound of flocking birds, and their various shrieks and laughters. At midday, crows made lunchtimes out of roadkill, hopping away for the semitrailers. In late afternoon, the cockatoos screeched—black-eyed and yellow-headed, and white in the blistering sky.
Still, birds or no birds, Featherton was famous for something else.
It was a place of farms and livestock.
A series of deep-holed mines.
More than anything, though, it was a place of fire:
It was a town where sirens howled and men of all descriptions, and a few women, zipped up orange overalls and walked out into the flames. Mostly, with the landscape stripped and stiffened black, they all returned, but every once in a while, when the fire roared that extra piece more, thirty-odd people would go in, and twenty-eight or twenty-nine would stagger back out; all sad-eyed, cough-ridden, but quiet. That’s when boys and girls with skinny arms and legs, and old faces, were told, “I’m sorry, son” or “I’m sorry, darl.”
Before he was the Murderer, he was Michael Dunbar.
His mother was an only parent, and he was an only child.
* * *
—
As you can see, in many ways, he was almost the perfect other half of Penelope; they were identical and opposite, like designed or destined symmetry. Where she came from a far-off watery place, his was remote and dry. Where he was the single son of an only mother, she was the only daughter of a single man. And lastly, as we’re about to see—and this was the greatest mirror, the surest parallel of fate—while she was practicing Bach, Mozart, and Chopin, he was obsessing on an art form of his own.
* * *
—
One morning, spring holidays, when Michael was eight, he sat in the surgery waiting room and it was 39 degrees Celsius; the thermometer on the door frame said so.