On Brunswick Ground Read Free Page B

of shopping.
    â€˜Will you give me a chance to drop this off?’
    Sarah nods. We decide to meet in fifteen minutes. She goes and I notice the swing of her step – a bushwalker ready to keep striding for days on end, until her back, turned away from the lights of home, becomes a tiny speck. As I walk home, I wonder why last minute things make me feel so safe.
    The pub stands on a corner and I walk into its belly of noise. How will I find her? It feels impossible, like having an appointment at a busy railway station. But there she is, perched on a stool quite near the door. She nods as I climb up onto the stool beside her. A man standing on the other side is trying to chat her up and she sheds casual smiles at him. Another one rocks up and starts talking about Jill Meagher.
    â€˜Bloody bastard, should have been strangled at birth.’
    Sarah’s green eyes consult mine as if bringing the bags home had not interrupted our conversation.
    â€˜That poor girl,’ breathes the newcomer, with the fruity vowels of a barrister.
    He has a bulbous alcoholic nose and seems to stand upright by a small miracle, yet shreds of intelligence flit in his eyes. After a moment of concentration, he draws his faculties together and asks:
    â€˜Do you think we’re all heartbroken because Jill Meagher worked at the ABC and was a cutie?’
    Sarah looks squarely at him:
    â€˜Mmmm, that public outpouring of grief oddly disturbed me – a bit of a Princess Di response. Why did the public choose to grieve this time? Why does the press earbash us about it? Was it because she was like us, but better – middle class, bright, beautiful … It could be more about class, than about the visceral, emotional reaction this spontaneous march would have us believe.’
    Her comment reminds me of the other crime Mitali told me about, the Indian man who killed his wife and then burned them both in their house. No mourning marches for her. With a smile too ripe for words, Sarah tips her head sideways and flicks a look in my direction.
    And what’s your take on that? asks her silence.
    I can’t find a word to say. I understand what she means but I don’t think of Jill Meagher as a public sacrifice, some inverted scapegoat, beautiful rather than ugly, deformed, or simply more ordinary. All I can think is why was she killed rather than any one of us, any woman here, with air in her lungs, a smile on her face and a glass to her lips? The man stares at me as if I really had said something, his agile mind lurking behind the alcohol. A moment passes between the three of us – a clearing – as if, with the sum of our thoughts, we’d just glimpsed some invisible thing beyond us, hanging in the air for the taking.
    Then he scrunches his eyes, grabs his drink and lifts it like a hurricane lamp before retreating. But suddenly his steps lag, and he sways back towards us. I find myself staring up into his face. His whisper barely reaches me.
    â€˜I was in the same bar on the twenty-first of September. I saw Jill Meagher on her last night alive.’
    He is moving away hurriedly now. Sarah has not heard. Only the stranger is told, the one with the accent, the one who will go and carry the secret overseas where it can be forgotten. I am not going anywhere, but I have no one to say it to, and it feels sacrilegious to comment on it now. Just as sacrilegious as if I were to speak to Sarah about Mitali’s feelings on the subject. It seems that everyone in Brunswick has some connection to Jill Meagher’s death, his or her own ken of bereavement.
    Hunched over her food, Sarah eats with pioneer moves. Tough and precise with her fork, she cuts her meat with a frown, eats slow and speaks fast between mouthfuls.
    â€˜I feel incredibly sad for her and her family. I’m not just saying this. I have a daughter. I have a mother in Adelaide. I also have a drunk barrister, a house painter, a photographer, an academic, a