Place is where I was staying that summer. It didn’t actually belong to someone called Sharon. Nor did it belong to me. I was house-sitting.
My last place in Melbourne was a share house in Brunswick. I wasn’t on the lease, and so I could go any time I wanted, and when I did, with only a week notice, they replaced me easily with another renter and so I had nowhere to come back to when Barcelona blew up in my face.
So how did I find myself in a luxurious apartment on the Docklands? The simple truth is that my sister saved my bacon. The truth is often quite lame, I’ve found. She’s in real estate in Sydney, which I can imagine is as fun as going for a paddle in shark-infested waters while someone throws a whole lot of fish guts around you. She’s two years older than me, tough as nails but very hard-love-kind, and I adore her. She married a quiet, unassuming kind of guy who is also quite lovely. In their early 30s they decided to start a family but discovered she couldn’t have kids and ever since then she’s been a fiend for her career.
Anyhow, she apparently knew this fella who was away in the USA and was willing to let me stay there for a bit rent free. He could be back any day, but until then he was happy for me to be there. At least that’s what she told me. My sister, needless to say, is a fucking legend.
Sharon’s Place is in the Docklands development just west of Melbourne. The Docklands used to be old unused sheds and falling down piers, where I remember going to numerous gay dance parties. Now it’s (mostly) colourful apartments and office buildings. The whole of the docklands area feels deserted and unfinished, probably because it is.
It wasn’t a bad apartment, I suppose. It was the type with yucca plants and a water feature in the entry hall and a telescope in the living room. All beige and kind of porny, you know? When I walked in my first thought was, Basic Instinct, w hich is of course why I called it Sharon’s Place, which was also kind of handy since my sister made me swear not to tell anyone who the real owner was. (Not that I talked to anyone from one day to the next, other than the skank at the 7-11 who hates my guts ever since the day I knocked her Skittles display on the ground. Accidentally.) All this secrecy was because the owner was famous—that is if you give a shit about what he does, which I didn’t and don’t. Well, I suppose, even if you don’t you might know who he is. I did the moment she mentioned him.
My sister would crucify me if she knew I was writing about him here. So from now on I’ll just call him X. No. Not X. That’s so been done. Y? No. Make it T… That’s his initial. That’ll do.
Mr T was away from Melbourne a lot and didn’t use the place much. It showed. It was totally soulless and barren. Maybe it was all that beige and Smeg appliances. I kind of wished there was some horrible cheese-encrusted waffle maker thing sitting on the kitchen bench, or milk crates as a bookshelf or some really well-worn something or other. But there were no THINGS anywhere. There were shelves but not things on them.
The whole place, the apartment, plus the Docklands, made me bored and antsy, but at the same time sapped my strength so I could do little but lie around or sleep. There was cable, so there were a million channels but nothing to watch, there was the telescope but I could find nothing to look at. One day I was so bored I just lay on the floor in the middle of the living room. I considered masturbating, but couldn’t be bothered and ended up watching flies circling the light-fitting. They circled each other warily, then suddenly one would make a dive for the other and they’d just spin around each other before separating and going back to gently circling again. This dog-fight went on and on and on for however-long before I got bored and went to the pool.
—
In the days following the disappearance there was a lot in the media about Matt Gray.
The first time the disappearance was reported he was nothing much more than a name and a single line of description, 35-year-old Prahran resident. Then there was more to say about him. Bit by bit we found out he worked as an account manager with a local real estate agent, was born and bred in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, and had been a keen swimmer all his life, representing both his school and his university with some success, more recently lap-swimming almost every day to maintain his fitness, but no longer competing. It all made him sound a bit of a yawn.
There were also plenty of details about the day that Matt disappeared, exactly what he said, what he wore, what he did, and when he said and wore and did it. I must admit I scoffed up all these insignificant little details, day after day, like salt and vinegar chips, picking up the crumbs with a licked finger.
On the day of the disappearance Matt’s arrival at the Prahran pool was timed at exactly 1.23 pm. He had a membership card, like I did, and the time he scanned through at the front desk was recorded. The attendants on the desk didn’t remember him coming in, but the computer recorded it to the minute. Once inside Matt changed into his swimwear, went onto the pool deck and joined a couple of friends, named in the paper ‘Paul’ and ‘Gil’, sitting on the aqua steps. He wore green and white striped Speedos, they said, thongs (they think but can’t be sure) and was carrying a backpack and a pair of goggles. He joined them for about 30 minutes, lay on his stomach in the sun and did not contribute to the conversation apart from saying ‘no thanks’ when they asked if he wanted a Diet Coke. Mysterious, hmm? After about a half hour of this, he got up and said it was time to do a few laps. He left his things with his towel laid out on the steps and walked towards the pool. Gil said he watched Matt step onto the edge of the pool and dive into the deep end of the fast lane. Paul wasn’t paying particular notice, but he also remembered Matt diving in. There was no fart-arsing around. He didn’t go anywhere else, just straight to the edge of the pool where he dived in. And from there, quite simply, he didn’t come back.
So where does 3.22 pm come into it? Well, at 3.22 pm precisely (so the call history revealed) Paul received an SMS message from another friend who had finished work early and wanted to see if the boys were at the pool. As Paul’s phone beeped and received this SMS message, Gil was looking at the pool and saw a swimmer do a tumble turn, showing a bum clad in green and white striped bathers. This person (Gil was absolutely positive) was Matt.
‘It was him,’ Gil was quoted as saying in one early interview. It was, apparently, more than just the green and white striped togs. Certainly they were rare and distinctive, but it was more than that, it was everything about this swimmer doing the tumble turn, the skin tone, the hair colour, the sense of the person, the fitness, the tallness. ‘I’m positive it was him. Absolutely positive.’
So, doing a tumble turn in the fast lane at precisely 3.22 pm is the last time Matt (if it was indeed him) was officially seen. By his friends at least. There were, of course, many strangers who came forward after the disappearance to say they had noticed Matt that day at the pool. They saw him doing his laps, they said. Diving in the deep end, they said. They remembered him as the one with the green and white striped togs, they said. One unidentified man was quoted without additional comment as saying, ‘Oh yeah. I saw him. He was quite nice but not my type.’ The timing of these various sightings though was mostly vague, and none of them could be pinpointed as rigidly as Gil’s at 3.22 pm, which became the official ‘last sighting’.
At closing time, when the crowd dispersed and Matt didn’t appear to be anywhere on the premises, his friends Gil and Paul felt there was nothing to do but report it. The police were called. They searched the entire pool grounds and buildings and confirmed that Matt was nowhere to be found. The staff members on the desk that afternoon were interviewed and stated they had not seen anyone matching Matt’s description leave the pool through the front entrance, but they were, they said, very busy and could not swear that he hadn’t. But of course he must have left. There was no other explanation. Although it seemed highly improbable that he would have done so dressed only in green and white striped Speedos.
Matt’s belongings were left
