Missing Woman

A woman has gone missing in Brunswick and her name drums through my body. With every rehashed detailing of her last known movements in the papers and on the news, I picture her tottering along in heels, tipsy, happy, heading home.

Her husband's wild grief has been aired too many times. It is too much. His white face has stained my mind, left it helplessly marked and sodden, like my own shroud of Turin.

Where is she?
I walk the question into the streets.
Where is she?
I pour it into my cereal. Wash in it. Turn it on when I turn the lights off.

The missing woman is a classic Irish beauty. Marble pale and black headed, the coils of her thick hair tangle past impish eyes and a jovial mouth, a mouth that seems poised, ready to tell us what we need to know.

In Chinatown I see a little boy with a shaved head staring at the poster, tongue flicking absent-mindedly as though he is colouring-in, concentrating. His mother calls to him and his meditative stillness ripples. He hesitates for a moment, suspended in a child's fathoming. But it is superseded by a firmer call and he twists away to his mother's sure side.

My brother preps me as we lie around in the sun in the park.
"I mean, even that could help you," he stubs an index finger on my jagged ship ring. "You could actually do a lot of damage to someone with that. If you got someone -" he swings his fist upwards, backwards, "like that, in the eye -" he brushes his own pretend ship ring past his brow in slow motion, "you'd fuck them up."
"I did that once by accident to a guy I was dancing with. I just missed his eye. He had blood running down his face. It was fucked."
"Yeah, well, do that," my brother urges, "and you should always walk with your keys between your fingers."

The missing woman's handbag has been found, five minutes from her house, which is ten minutes from the bar where she was last seen. The police have been scrutinising CCTV footage of her walking down Sydney Road, and are going to release it later today. But I can already see it in my mind. The fuzzy last steps of a woman before she exits the frame.