A new literary crime ficción by the Melbourne Flâneur, Dean Kyte, written in his nouvelle démeublée noire style. Two men crossing Sydney’s famous Oxford Street spot a disturbing sight on the opposite sidewalk...
lyrics
As they entered the final block of Oxford Street, Steve took his hand out of Lance’s and assumed a more erect posture, walking half a step apart from him, further to the left.
Lance, for his part, maintained his lanky, casual stride, his right forefinger crooked through the collar label of his jacket, slung nonchalantly over his shoulder. He continued to look dead ahead towards the park and Centrepoint Tower edging into view from behind the Oaks on the opposite corner, but what exactly he was looking at the shorter man could not tell, for Lance’s eyes were perfectly concealed behind the flat mirrored lenses of his aviator sunglasses.
His white dress shirt was still uncannily crisp, the sleeves folded up three careful turns to just below the elbow, exposing a tanned, muscular expanse of forearm, poilu to the appropriate degree of eroticism. His top button was undone and his loosened bloodcoloured tie, clasped to the front of his shirt by the mapleleaf insignia of goldplated enamel, flopped limply upon itself. His brown hair was still tussled, crowning the narrow oval face which came to an attractive point in the firm, slightly cleft chin, and in the midst of the light blue shadow rising on it apace with the declension of the day, now just beyond its zenith, the small, girlish mouth was tightly pursed, the lips drawn as if Lance were gnawing on something—the inside of his bottom lip, perhaps.
At the intersection, the order of the traffic lights dictated that they should first cross Oxford Street and then College in order to reach the park. The chatter of the walk signal issuing from the Smartpole soon bade them cross, but as they drew near to the opposite kerb, Steve pointed across Lance’s chest towards a trio of signal boxes by the window of a Thai restaurant on the ground floor of the Oaks.
—Look, he said. He looks like you—a bit.
The tallest and nearest of the three signal boxes to them, set a little apart and above its brethren on a cement plinth, was decorated with a blackandwhite line drawing so that it looked like the single, isolated panel in a comic strip drawn upon the broad face of Oxford Street, and from which all the circumambient panels which would have given it context had been erased.
A man in a white business shirt, his sleeves folded up, his collar open, his striped tie loosened, was hanging on the line of an old corded telephone while a large ledger lay open and two ringbound file folders were piled before him. His lips were pursed as he listened impassively with lowered head and drawn brows to the party at the other end of the line. From his head, a thought projected.
—Is the wealth and status my job provides worth this existential dread?
—What’s the matter? Lance said, camping up the broad Albertan drawl as his head swivelled slowly down in a smooth panning motion, as if mounted on a pivot, to regard Steve. You get paid, don’t you? – in both ways.
The small, girlish lips bent into a smile without revealing Lance’s teeth, but the two wedgeshaped lenses of the aviator sunglasses screwed into his eyesockets were abysmal: Steve saw himself doubly caught in them.
Nevertheless, as they reached the opposite sidewalk, Lance faked a slight trip on the slanting edge of the kerbstone: his jacket, hanging loose, swung against his back and Lance felt the papers in his breast pocket graze reassuringly against him.
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