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Uniacke court

by Dean Kyte

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In this suspenseful short story, Melbourne writer Dean Kyte evokes the underbelly of Melbourne’s famous laneways, whose colourful street art belies dark mysteries...

lyrics

It was 6:00 p.m., hour when the bars and restos begin their trade in earnest, and a grey, rainy veil moved before him in the wind. He wore the moist grey evening as comfortably as his duncoloured trenchcoat. The rubber soles of his brogues paused in their flânerie opposite Uniacke court, arrested by the emanation of its fascinating aura.

Some vibration, almost inaudible beneath the slough and slur of cars which passed him in Little Bourke street, drew his attention to the alleyway, coming to lurid life with the greasy transience of the restaurant trade, debouching its odorous kitchen doors onto the court.

Three lamps—purple, blue and red—sleazily leaked their light, dripping down the slick, graffito’d wall of rainwet paint, spraying grape upon, blurring, rouging with their lurid, vicious, viscous tints the already diabolical cast of the Joker’s laughing visage defacing the wall. These neon comets traced their nasty paths to pool over the narrow, oily ledge of sidewalk, puddling in the gutter, bruising and burnishing the asphalt with their mottled hues.

Above these lights, three others, yellowwhite, stretching from the rear of the court and spaced at intervals along the western wall, beckoned him like a crooked finger. The light in the deepest depths of the court burned permanently, but the two nearer him came on, one at a time, flaring briefly, and then, just as abruptly, extinguishing themselves in a tattoo. He heard rather than saw the ominous sirencall of this pattern repeating itself at fewsecond intervals.

This spectacle did not transfix him; something beneath and in back of it seemed to call him forward, into the gallery of the laneway, draped in teeming shadows which regarded him familiarly. He could see the provocative cartoon of the spraypainted redhead, receiver held to her ear, deeply décolletée, at the end of the court. An arc of shadow fell across her glinting, catlike eyes like a widow’s veil, giving her a plotting, conspiratorial air as she listened intently to the silent intelligence vibrating at the other end of the wire.

The ineffable tug of that mysterious energy emanating from the court lightly grasped lapel and sleeve, and one foot, followed by the other, was summoned off the low sidewalk.

In a very few steps he had forded Little Bourke street and stood at the penumbrous edge of the mystery.

He knew, with the muffled heartbreak of professional instinct, what he would find in the dark car nestled at her breast.

credits

released December 15, 2021
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HD Retro Trailers: “Gilda (1946) ORIGINAL TRAILER [HD 1080p]”
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Dean Kyte Melbourne, Australia

Dean Kyte is a writer, filmmaker and flâneur.

His CD of prose poetry and literary crime fiction, “The Spleen of Melbourne”, is available on BC.

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