This is the story of the blank motel postcard Angelique found among her father’s papers.
Ruark wakes four minutes past noon at the Kythera Motel in Canberra. He gets out of bed stinking of the duplicitous woman. Sunlight is breaking through the threadbare curtains. Something went very wrong last night. He feels like shit. And he has to wait for a verdict.
Rock Hudson is on the colour TV in McMillan & Wife. The theme music is Vegas brass, Hollywood strings, some sort of electronic organ. The credits show in lurid colour the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts, cable cars, the Fairmont Hotel, Haight-Ashbury. The San Francisco Ruark knows is North Beach, Keystone Korner, late nights at the San Remo Hotel, a vacation years ago.
Ruark uses the ceramic electric jug to make tea. Except for the colour TV the Kythera Motel has not been renovated. Everything has decayed: the lime green porcelain toilet and sink and shower-stall-cum-bath are rust-stained and chipped, the mosaic of small orange floor tiles marred by cracks, the orange bedspread thin, the nylon chocolate brown carpet frayed. Fourteen years ago he stayed here with Lucy, just after they were married, both attending the ’66 conference, both about to be posted to Senegal in time for the World Festival of Negro Arts. The Kythera Motel had just opened and the paint was still drying. A cameraman was shooting promotional photos out on Northbourne Avenue. He asked the guests to pose on their balconies, but Ruark and Lucy didn’t go for that kind of thing.
Now Ruark is back in Australia to present a progress report to the latest conference. Lucy has stayed in Dakar to look after her troubled Senegalese friend Nafissa, heavily pregnant and without a husband. Ruark flew into Sydney alone. Driving on the Hume Highway he’d taken a detour to check their house on the outskirts of Campbelltown. They’d never lived there, the house had always been anonymously tenanted, the mortgage was now paid off, and they were earning an income from the rent. Whenever he was back in Australia, rare these days, Ruark drove by. The whole neighbourhood had grown, theirs the first house on the street in ‘74, now surrounded by quarter-acre lots, and just across the highway an entirely new Housing Commission suburb named Radburn, a twisting centipede of cul-de-sacs with communal front lawns, a bizarre Modernist street layout, all the residents on welfare. Ruark drove along the streets and noted the abandoned shopping trolleys, the piles of plastic rubbish, the pregnant young girls, the thirteen-year-old boys sniffing glue in the shadeless parks. If Lucy could see this.
The conference had been dull except for the African woman named Oseye, a representative from Nigeria, or so she said. They’d shared a bottle of chablis at the dinner and arranged to reunite later at the Kythera. She’d left Ruark’s bed and his room sometime after midnight. He couldn’t remember exactly. After she was gone he dozed in a restless guilt, surprised by the way things had gone. I finally cheat on my wife with a beautiful black woman, he thought, after fourteen years desiring it every day in West Africa, and I do it in Canberra of all places?
Then at three o’clock two Australian officials in rough brown suits knocked at the door. Their words tumbled out as Ruark tried to shake off his grogginess: an incredible indiscretion, a suspicious woman we’ve been following, associations with the Dhaban dictator Omar Kolo, paranoia and torture, the secret war on Senegal’s borders. What do I know about that? Ruark said, I have no intimacy or influence with President Senghor or anybody else in the Senegalese government, I’m an aid worker, a teacher. Why would this woman want to approach me? All we did was talk about Afrobeat music and come back here to have sex. The officials seemed to have believed Ruark, or maybe that was just an act. You may be too compromised to go safely back to Dakar now, they said, this could be the end of your career abroad. And my marriage, Ruark said, if my wife finds out. They told him to remain in the motel and await the decision.
Now Ruark showers, eats a cold piece of chicken, and watches a bit of a Lana Turner movie on Capital 7. It’s so boring he walks down to the reception to rent one of those VCR machines and a movie on videocassette. The long-haired guy at the desk has a box of tapes supplied by his brother in Sydney where they have four TV stations (Canberra has just two). My brother even cuts the ads out, the desk clerk says. I have plenty of AO-Modified movies if you’re in the mood for something spicy. Ruark shrugs and selects Two Mules for Sister Sara, although he saw it years before. And on the reception desk he sees the motel’s dated souvenir postcard, a photograph of the building which goes back to the sixties, to the very occasion he and Lucy were guests. Ruark has never seen the finished photograph. He takes the postcard and goes back to his room.
He connects the VCR cables to the TV, puts in the cassette, fast-forwards through a long-winded introduction by a guy called Bill Collins, and as the titles play over the Mexican desert he looks at the postcard showing the Kythera Motel back in ‘66. There are several guests visible on the front-facing balconies or just behind their curtains. Ruark and Lucy were staying on the top floor at the end of the row of rooms. Their balcony is empty. In the darkness beyond the open curtains they were probably lying in bed.
And then Ruark begins to tremble. In the lower left hand corner of the photograph there are three suited men and a woman. They stand on the path at the rear of the motel. The tallest man is facing the camera and he is unmistakably Jacob De Vries, whom Ruark was not to meet until a party in Dakar in the early seventies. A chance meeting, he’d always thought, that led to a brief and ultimately unpleasant acquaintance, nothing more than a few drinks by the pool at the Hotel Teranga. De Vries was ostensibly an official with a pan-African trade organisation. He was arrested in Dakar in 1974 and accused of spying on anti-apartheid movements for South Africa. But why the fuck is he at the Kythera Motel in Canberra all the way back in 1966?
There is a sharp knock at Ruark’s door. The verdict.
