The White Body of Evening (38 page)

There was something eerily melancholic in these stories, a touch of madness, the desperation of loneliness and solitude, the strange life of a city full of cracked tunes and tainted visions. There was one particular circumstance in all of this that people still claim to remember with great clarity. Once a week, two graceful ladies would walk arm in arm through the arcade to the magic shop. When Mr Walters saw them outside his window he’d scurry to the door and lock it, leaving these poor women tapping on the glass with their parasols, or whatever it was women carried in those days. After a moment or two they’d give up and walk away, only to return the next week, to be rebuffed in the same fashion.

The children who hung around the shop looked upon these two mysterious women with awe, envisaging them floating in the sooty half-light of the arcade like a pair of radiant apparitions, their feet barely touching the flagstones. Nobody doubted that, had they wanted to, the two of them could have drifted right through the glass to the counter where Mr Walters sat, sullenly clinging to a bag of old tricks.

“Perhaps I’ll go to Europe,” he’d mutter to himself. “I can always go back to Europe.”

T
he verse at the beginning of the book comes from “Sunsets” by Richard Aldington as found in
The Complete Poems of Richard Aldington
(London: Allan Wingate, 1948). It is reproduced here with kind permission from the Estate of Richard Aldington.

The Karl Kraus essay discussed in Chapter 18 is ‘Der Prozeß Riehl’ in
Die Fackel
211, November 1906 pp 1–28, quoted in Edward Timms’s
Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp 84–5.

The newspaper article describing the Gun Alley murder that appears in Chapter 23 was excerpted from an article originally published in the
Weekly Times,
7 January 1922.

In addition, there are a number of historical reference works that have helped me a great deal in the course of writing this book. They are Gerhard Fischer’s
Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Homefront Experience in Australia, 1914–1920
(St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989); Mel Gordon’s
The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror
(New York: Da Capo Books, 1997); James Grant and Geoffrey Serle’s
The Melbourne Scene, 1803–1956
(Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1957); Susan Priestley’s
South Melbourne: a History
(Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995); Alan Sharpe’s
Crimes that Shocked Australia
(Milson’s Point: Currawong Press, 1982); Carl E. Schorske’s
Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980); Jüngen Tampke’s
Wunderbar Country: Germans Look at Australia, 1850–1914
(Sydney: Hale and Ironmonger, 1982) and Edward Timms’s
Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).

Finally, Siegfried Kracauer’s wonderful essay “Abschied von der Lindenpassage”, in
Stra?en in Berlin und anderswo
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1964), has shaped my view of Melbourne’s arcades for so long that I’d be hard pressed to know exactly where the Lindenpassage ended and the Eastern Arcade began.

A number of people have been very generous with their support and expertise throughout the completion of this book. I would like to thank Rod Morrison, not only for his initial faith in the manuscript, but for his constant and careful attention to its editing and production. Belinda Lee and Carl Harrison-Ford also read the manuscript and contributed valuable editorial advice. Finally, without the support (patient and impatient) of Rachel and Rosa, my own fragile ego might not have stood up to it all. I owe them the greatest debt.