St Kilda Blues by Geoffrey McGeachin Page A

For some people that knowledge was too much to live with.
    Charlie Berlin knew he was lucky. Rebecca had pulled him back from the brink several times and then the kids had given him a focus, a reason to fight the blackness and despair when the memories reared up from the dark place he kept them hidden. Rebecca had her own ghosts, of course, but she handled them better than he did, and she understood him. Alice, Bob Roberts’ wife, was a good woman, a good wife, a good mother, but she wasn’t Rebecca. Alice Roberts hadn’t understood the changes in her husband after his beating and she’d dealt with them by smiling and pretending everything was fine.
    The Roberts’ marriage had struggled on for six or seven years until it was suddenly a time of free love, doing your own thing and sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. This new era suited the different person Bob had become and there were a series of steadily younger and younger girls on the side until the day he finally up and walked out on his family. He’d eventually set up shop in a run-down Carlton flat with a blonde, pretty enough and just old enough Melbourne Uni arts student. Though christened Justine, the girl now called herself Sunshine and favoured long peasant skirts and tie-dyed cheesecloth blouses worn without a bra. She came from old money, with a barrister father and society-page mother, and Berlin figured her affair with Roberts, an older man, was rebellion or some sort of rite of passage.
    He walked slowly back to the waiting car. After checking one more time for any sign of vomit on his coat or trousers he climbed back into the passenger seat.
    â€˜Something you ate, Charlie?’
    â€˜Probably. I made dinner last night so who knows? Let’s get going.’
    It was a short run from the marina and the bad coffee to Fitzroy Street and the St Kilda end of Albert Park Lake. Half a night, a day and a full night had passed since Gudrun had disappeared, and it was the nights Berlin most wanted not to think about. He also knew he had to put aside that memory from the snow-covered Polish roadway for the moment. It was just one more thing to force down deep into the black space where all the bad moments lived. He had to concentrate on the girl, and just the girl, if she was to have any chance of coming home.
    Roberts parked the sports car on Lakeside Drive just a short walk from the lake. Reaching across Berlin to the glove compartment he took out a fresh packet of Craven A cigarettes. Berlin saw several more cigarette packets inside before Roberts slammed the lid shut.
    As they walked across the grass to the lake a strong breeze from the east was puckering the sleek grey surface of the water. A muddy area by the lakeside still showed residual signs of being trampled flat by police and ambulance men. The odd patch of grass was gamely fighting its way back, reminding Berlin of the condition of the ground on a cold and rainy late Saturday afternoon at Windy Hill after Essendon had trounced or been trounced by a visiting team. Apart from the battered earth, there were very few signs marking this spot as the place where the life of a young girl had ended.

THE MISSION
October 1950
    Towards dusk he heard the sound of bells somewhere ahead and the landscape began to turn from brown to green. The mission sat on an artesian basin, Brother Brian explained, and the water pumped up from below ground was the only reason that life could exist in such a hostile place. The boy first saw the windmills that did the pumping and then there were fields of green crops, with farm machinery scattered about and, on a hillside, neat rows of little bushes. Grapevines, Brother Brian explained, to make wine for the mission.
    Buildings began to appear, mud brick houses and rough wooden barns for the horses that pulled the farm machinery and pens for the cattle and sheep. Half a dozen two-storey buildings surrounded the church, the severe and utilitarian design