Dead Point (10 page)

‘Knew him well?’

‘Yeah. A bit. Came in year eleven. Clever bloke, very smart. Went to uni after. Him and Janice Eller were the only ones.’

‘Know his family?’

‘Only Mrs Reilly.’

‘A relation?’

‘His auntie. She went back to England, oh, six, seven years ago. Robbo said his mum and dad split up when he was a kid, left him with someone. Then his dad got some tropical wog, PNG, I can’t remember, he died. His mum didn’t want to know him, she was in England, I think.’

He paused, sniffed. ‘Mind you, Robbo was a bit of a bullshitter. Bit of the poof in him, too. Arty-farty.’

‘So Robbie wasn’t part of the Forestry move up here?’

‘Nah. Just came the same year.’

A projectile-nosed woman with a scarf tied over her narrow head came to the counter, copy of
New Knitting
in hand.

‘Sellin things today?’ she said. ‘Or just natterin?’

Terry didn’t look at her, took the magazine and passed a barcode reader over it. It appeared not to work. He sighed, jabbed at the till keyboard.

‘Voted for this government, mate,’ he said. ‘Make no secret of it, never have. I can tell you, never again. This GST…no, don’t get me goin on the subject.’

‘Shockin, the price of this,’ the woman said. ‘You put it up every second month.’

‘Don’t blame me,’ said Terry. ‘That’s the pound done that, pound and the GST. Beats me how the pound can be worth more than the dollar. I need that explained to me. That’s four twenty-five change. Thank you, Mrs Lucas.’

‘Profiteerin goin on, no doubt in my mind.’

He watched her go, slit-eyed. ‘Old bitch,’ he said. ‘Shit I have to put up with.’

‘So there’s no family around that you know of?’

‘Nah.’

‘He didn’t come back here?’

‘Nah. I heard he dropped out of uni, Janice Eller’s mum told me that.’

I said, ‘I might talk to Janice Eller. How would I do that?’

He blinked, ran a knuckle over his pink lower lip. ‘Dead, mate,’ he said. ‘Thredbo.’

Thredbo was a one-word Australian story, a tragedy on the snowfields, a large piece of hillside coming unstuck, people dying under collapsed buildings.

‘What about her family?’

‘Only had a mum. She died.’

Not your most profitable expedition, this trip to Walkley. Nothing gained and nothing in prospect but an indigestible meal and a night in some sagging motel bed.

‘Anyone around here who’d know anything about Robbie?’

He shook his head. ‘Nah, don’t think so. This girl came up here from Sydney with the Forestry, hung around Robbo. What was her name? My mate Sim had a thing for her…Sandra someone.’

‘Your mate around?’

‘Gone barra fishin, way up there in the Territory, lucky bugger. Should be back soon.’

I got out a card. ‘I’d appreciate it if you could ask him to give me a ring.’

I got as far as Lithgow. I’d got as far as Lithgow once before, in the largely blank period after my second wife, Isabel, was murdered by a client of mine. At least I think it was Lithgow. I wasn’t paying much attention in those days, only sober for as long as it took me to drive from one town to another, any town with a pub to any other town with a pub. If it was Lithgow I remembered, some kind of miners’ strike was going on and, in the pub, a drunk miner accused me of being a journalist from Sydney. I didn’t deny it, didn’t care to, just had a fight with him.

No pub fights on this visit. I drove into the cold valley town, breathed the coal smoke from the fires, bought two stubbies of Boag and a bottle of mineral water from a drive-in bottle shop, found a place that made hamburgers and got one with the lot, except the egg. In a room at an unlovely brick-veneer motel, I drank the beer and ate my supper in front of a television set that changed channels on its own. Then, tired in many ways, I went to bed with my book,
Dying High: Lies About a Climber’s Life
, bought on impulse months before, grabbed on my way out to get a taxi to the airport. There is something about the stupidity of climbing mountains that appeals. Perhaps it’s the clinging by the fingertips to inhospitable surfaces. I could claim some experience in this area.

In the night, I was woken by the sounds of quick sex close by, intimately close, centimetres away, just beyond the plasterboard wall. Startled, for a moment unsure of where I was, saddened when I remembered, I wrapped the sour foam pillow around my head, lay thinking about Robbie Colburne. Then I moved on to Cynthia and her attacker with the Saint tattoo, drifted off, listening to the trucks hissing, groaning, whining on the highway, thinking about my life, why equilibrium escaped me, why I couldn’t find a steady state, chose to ask questions of strangers, lie down in beds too short, turn and turn again between cold, slithery, electric nylon sheets.

I rose just after dawn, creaks in my knees, happy to be going. I’d only had brief times in my life when I wasn’t happy to be going. Sneakily, shamefully happy. Cleansed in a cramped, stained fibreglass chamber, I went outside. In the coal valley, the air was freezing. White breath hung on the face of a man walking two small dogs, clung to a few pale shift-workers coughing on the first of the day. They were all I saw on my way to the steep, winding road out of the valley. There was a moment on the heights when I could look back: nothing to see, the place gone, buried in sallow, yellow dawn-mist.

On the plane home, I sat next to a middle-aged dentist from Collaroy. Shortly after take-off, and without the slightest encouragement, he told me that he was leaving his wife and two children, aged eleven and thirteen, to be with a Melbourne person he had met at a cosmetic dentistry conference in Hawaii.

‘These things happen,’ I said. Another man grateful to be going.

‘I wasn’t looking for it to happen. It just happened. Like a…like a bolt of lightning. Can you understand that?’

‘Without any difficulty.’ I got out my book, found my place.

‘Well, you don’t do something like this lightly, do you?’

‘No. You wouldn’t.’

The dentist leaned over, looked at me from close range. I suppose they get used to doing that, a life of looking into people’s mouths. After a while, you lose the feeling of intruding.

‘I feel like I’m on a personal journey,’ he said. ‘The road less travelled.’

I looked at him briefly, a mistake.

‘Know what I mean?’ he said, licked his lips.

‘Yes.’

Complicit, I didn’t say that it was not so much a personal journey on a road less travelled as a trip in a crammed bus on a six-lane freeway. All I wanted to do was read. This would stop me thinking about the distinctly unhealthy coughing note I’d detected in the port engine.

My companion went on exploring metaphors for his condition all the way to Melbourne. From time to time, I fed him a new one to keep him from asking me questions.

Home. The comforting feel of one’s own tarmac.

On the way from the airport, I got off the suicidal freeway before the tollway began, perversely took to choked Bell Street, and at length found my way to St Georges Road and Brunswick Street. It was early afternoon, overcast. I lucked on a parking spot near Meaker’s, went in and ordered a toasted chicken sandwich from Carmel, the worldly child.

‘Tell him it’s for Jack,’ I said. ‘That sometimes stops him leaving the bones in.’

‘I’ll write it down,’ she said. ‘I’m too scared to speak to him.’

Enzio the cook was subject to mood swings. From bad to much, much worse, and back. I’d almost finished reading the form for Mornington when his squat figure emerged from the kitchen, scowled at the room, came over and put a plate down in front of me: big sourdough slices containing Enzio’s secret filling of chicken, red capsicum, ricotta and other unidentifiable stuff, the whole flattened under a hot weight. I felt saliva start.

Enzio sat down, looked around, pointed his blunt and unshaven chin at me. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Hair transplants. What you think?’

‘Can we talk about this later? Hair and food don’t mix.’

He ignored my plea. ‘This woman,’ he said, ‘she likes hair.’

‘A new woman?’

‘At the market. Her husband died. She talks about his hair all the time, lovely hair, strong hair.’ He ran his hand over the surviving strands on his scalp. Unlovely, unstrong.

I looked at my sandwich. The point about a toasted sandwich is that it is eaten warm.

‘Talks where? Where are you when she talks about hair?’

He jerked his head. ‘Where you think? Where you talk this kind of talk?’

I gave him the lawyerly eye. ‘Enzio, if this woman wanted hair, she wouldn’t be talking to you in bed about hair. She’s feeling guilty because she’s having such a good time. Her hairy husband, all he had was hair. That’s all she can find to say about him. You, on the other hand, you’ve got something else.’

I paused, bent my head closer. ‘It’s not hair she wants, Enzio. Get me?’

The ends of Enzio’s mouth bent down, slowly, a sinister, knowing look.

‘Fuck hair,’ he said. He made a gesture with his right forearm that brooked no misinterpretation.

‘Exactly. Now get back to work.’

He left. In the doorway to the kitchen, he turned. Our eyes met. He gave me a confident nod. Several nods.

Next patient, Dr Irish. Would that all problems admitted of such effortless solutions. In particular, my problems. The sandwich was still warm. Halfway, I signalled for the coffee, the short signal, thumb and index fingers a centimetre apart.

Carmel brought the potent eggcup of coffee and a yellow A4 envelope. ‘Enzio says this came yesterday.’ She touched the tip of her tongue to her upper lip, a kissable upper lip. ‘He’s whistling,’ she said. ‘Is there a secret?’

‘Make them come to you,’ I said. ‘Never use force.’

She nodded, no expression. ‘Thank you. I believe some call you the cookmaster.’

‘The knowing do,’ I said.

Carmel was clearing the table next to the door as I left.

‘Your work here will never be done,’ she said.

The office was cold and I noticed dust. How could anyone trust a solicitor whose office was dusty? I put on the blow heater and the smell of hot dust filled the room. How had this dust problem crept up on me?

Cyril Wootton on the answering machine, twice, a Wootton urgent but not irascible, which was unusual. My sister, Rosa, mildly exasperated, which was not. Drew Greer, saying unkind, mocking things about St Kilda’s performance against West Coast. Sad but to be expected from someone rendered agnostic by the death of Fitzroy. And Mrs Purbrick.

Jack, darling, such short notice but you must come for drinks tomorrow, six-ish, no excuses accepted
.

It’s business, I thought. And my chance to meet the Cundalls. Everyone else had.

I rang Cyril.

‘As always, Mr Wootton will be delighted to have made contact with you,’ said Mrs Davenport. Every day, she sounded more like Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

‘But do we ever really make contact, Mrs Davenport? We talk, we may even touch, but do we make contact? I mean, in the sense of…’

‘Putting you through,’ she said.

‘Jesus, Jack,’ said Wootton, ‘mobile that’s not switched on, what the fuck is the purpose…’

‘Silence is the purpose, Cyril. The silence in which to do one’s work.’

He gave me a silence. Then he made a noise, not so much animal as vegetable, the noise a sad carrot or potato might make, the noise of something deeply, hopelessly embedded in mud.

‘The client would like a progress report,’ he said.

Spoilt rotten, judges. Associates and clerks and tipstaffs and witnesses and defendants and jurors and learned counsel in silly wigs, all hanging on their every word, many of them hanging and fawning.

‘Tell the client I’ll report when there’s something worth reporting.’

Wootton whistled, put the phone down. He’d be one of the fawners. I’d have to ask Cyril how it was that Mr Justice Colin Loder brought the problem of Robbie Colburne to him.

I sat down and thought about my progress. Nil, really. Robbie left the country and didn’t appear to have come back. That was about it. It was strange but there were possible explanations.

Time to go home. Dawn in cold Lithgow seemed days away.

Halfway to my car, I heard a car slowing behind me, looked around, flight-or-fight coming into play: a red Alfa, new, two men in it. At an unthreatening crawl, it drew level, and the passenger window slid down.

‘Jack Irish?’

The man was young, sleek dark hair, a mole beside his mouth. He was wearing a grey polo-neck and a soft-looking black leather jacket without a collar.

I nodded, kept walking.

‘For you,’ he said, holding out a brown paper bag. ‘From a friend.’

Without thinking, I took it. The car pulled away, braked before it took the sharp corner, a double pulse of red light in the gloomy day.

The bag held a video cassette, new, unlabelled. Courtesy, presumably, of Detective Sergeant Warren Bowman.

At home, I half-filled the bath, drowsed in it for a long time with a glass of single malt, the end of a bottle given to me by Lyall, bought duty-free in some airport servicing a trouble spot. Or Santa bloody Barbara. It was peaceful in the big room, a bedroom when I bought the building. Once upon a time, a fire had sometimes been lit in the brick hearth on a cold Sunday afternoon, one person had read in the bath, the other had sat in the armchair.

I thought more about Robert Colburne. The judge was paying to find out what had really happened to him if he hadn’t accidentally overdosed. He said he was acting on behalf of someone who knew Robbie, lost touch with him for a long time, then made contact again in Melbourne.

I didn’t like the feel of that story, the distance it placed between Mr Justice Loder and Robbie.

Musing in the claw-footed bath, a bath big enough for two, if they arranged themselves.

I dismissed that memory, rose and donned un-ironed but clean garments and began the preparation of a modest meal.

I drank some red wine, moved roughly chopped onion around for a while, kept away from the hot spot that the famous and expensive French frying pan wasn’t supposed to have. The French are the finest conpeople in the world. I added garlic and mushrooms, a tin of tomatoes.