Black Tide (3 page)

16

‘First of three,’ said Wilbur Ong.

‘Three frees in a row,’ Eric said. ‘Roy puts a hand on these sheilas, they get a kick. Win by a point.’

‘The next week…’ said Norm O’Neill.

‘I’m tellin this story,’ said Eric. ‘The next week this actor Crebbin that got the little knock on the head, he gets married. Nice-lookin girl from the picture in the paper. And who d’ya think’s standing next to her at the altar, givin her away?’

‘Could it be her father?’

‘Her bloody father. And who’s her bloody father?’

‘Surely not?’

‘Too bloody true. The bloody ump give the game to the Tigers. How d’ya like that?’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Not at all.’

Stan put down his paperback and came over, scratching the surviving corkscrew hairs on his head. ‘You bin scarce,’ he said.

‘Duty called,’ I said. ‘Been out there saving a man from a cruel miscarriage of justice.’

‘Don’t have to go out. Save a man from a cruel bloody miscarriage of justice right here,’

said Stan. ‘You’re the old man’s lawyer, talk him into sellin this dump, save me wastin my whole life listenin to old farts goin on about dead footy players.’

Stan’s father, Morris, owned the pub and, at 87, showed no interest in selling it.

‘Find a suitable buyer and I’ll think about it,’ I said and ordered a round.

Stan was at the tap, drawing beers without looking, when he said loudly, ‘Speakin of dead footy players, had a bloke in here this mornin, wants to buy the pictures.’

All talk stopped.

‘The pictures?’ said Wilbur Ong. ‘What pictures?’

Stan gestured around the walls with the back of a meaty hand. ‘The photos. All this junk.’

‘Bloke,’ said Norm O’Neill, cold voice. ‘What kind of a bloke?’

17

Stan put down a glass, hitched his pants over his paunch. ‘Very nice bloke. Well-dressed. Blazer and grey flannels.’

‘What kind of a bloke?’ said Norm, voice now icy.

Stan drew the last beer with great concentration, held it up and inspected the head.

‘Brisbane Lions bloke,’ he said. ‘Reckons the photos’d be better off in Brisbane in this Lions clubhouse they got there, big luxury clubhouse. Carpets. Got a Lions Wall of Fame. In the bistro.’

‘In the what?’ said Eric Tanner.

Stan shook his head in sadness. ‘Italian term we in the hospitality industry use, Eric.’

In the silence, you could hear the traffic on Smith Street, hear two women talking as they walked by outside.

I looked around the pub walls. The bits you could see between the photographs were stained the colour of black tea by a hundred years of tobacco smoke. The photographs recorded Fitzroy Football Club sides and players going back to the turn of the century.

On my way to the toilet through the door marked GENTS, I often paused to look at my father, big, dark Bill Irish, in the sides of the late 1940s. My grandfather was on the wall too. He had three seasons in the seniors before breaking an arm in two places against Collingwood. His team’s faded photographs were near the dartboard.

‘Lions Wall of Fame,’ said Eric Tanner, head tilted, eyes slits. ‘What Lions would those be?’

‘The way he put it,’ Stan said. ‘Fitzroy Football Club’s in Brisbane now, photos should be there too.’

The silence was absolute.

Norm O’Neill’s nose seemed to grow larger, now much more than a prominent feature on a facial landscape, now it was the landscape, a nose and glasses with a face attached. He cleared his throat.

‘Stanley,’ he said, ‘Stanley, you’re missin somethin.’ He was speaking slowly and clearly, leaning forward, knuckles on the bar. ‘Fitzroy Football Club’s not in Brisbane, Stanley.

Fitzroy Football Club can never be in Brisbane. Nobody can take the Lions to Brisbane.

Why is that, Stanley? Because Fitzroy Football Club can only be in Fitzroy.’

Norm paused, looked around the room. Then he said, ‘Well, bloody Brisbane can put a lion on their jumpers but that doesn’t mean the Lions are now in that bloody tropical 18

hellhole. The Lions are here, in this bloody pub. And they’re not yours to sell. Grasp that, can you?’

Silence, all eyes on Stan.

Stan picked up a beer glass, held it to the light. ‘Be that as it may,’ he said. ‘Pretty good price offered. Never thought the old photos’d be worth anything.’

‘You talk to Morris about this?’ asked Wilbur.

‘Don’t need to talk to anyone,’ said Stan. ‘I’m the manager. He’s sittin in the sun in Queensland with all the other ancient buggers got any brains. This pub, I decide what happens.’

‘I remember you when you were two bricks and a pisspot high, your mum made a little Roys jumper for you,’ said Wilbur.

‘Given it a lot of thought,’ said Stan. ‘Bloke gets an answer tomorrow.’

Without even glancing at one another, Norm, Wilbur and Eric stood up. Charlie rose from his barstool. Wearily, I got up, put on a menacing look.

‘And what, Stanley,’ asked Norm, ‘and I want you to think hard about this. What is the answer?’

There was a long silence. Stan looked at each of us in turn, little smile on his face, put the glass down, turned and set off back to his paperback. Over his shoulder, he said,

‘Given it a lot of thought.’

He picked up the book and looked down the counter at us.

We waited.

‘Reckon I’ll tell him to piss off,’ said Stan.

We all sat down and went back to drinking beer.

At 6.30, a car hooted outside. Three hoots. I said my goodbyes, went out with Charlie.

His granddaughter Augustine’s car was at the door. She leaned over and opened the passenger door.

‘What did trade unions do to deserve this striking woman?’ I asked. Gus was a rising star in the union movement. She looked like Lauren Bacall with brains, a sight to soothe any old worker’s eye.

19

‘What did Taub’s Cabinetmaking do to deserve the most fetching man ever to mate two pieces of wood?’ said Gus.

‘They are both the undeserving,’ I said. ‘We are the deserving. Can we be brought together?’

‘Listen,’ said Charlie, fighting with the seatbelt. ‘In Kooyong, the library. You remember.’

‘I thought you made that up.’

‘People who look for criminals, they make up. Yesterday, this wife rings up. The man, he’s gone. But she wants it still. Measure up next week.’

‘I’ve got tables to finish. Little tables. Day’s work for a man who actually works. More for someone like me.’

‘Next week.’

‘Take him away, Gus,’ I said. ‘He’s ruined a spiritual moment.’

‘It’s a gift,’ she said. ‘The whole family has it.’

4

On the way home, sense of achievement gone, I went via a place in St George’s Road for some takeaway Chinese comfort food. They know me there. I don’t have to order.

As I come in, Lester barks, ‘How many?’ Until recently, the answer was Two. These days, it’s One.

Opening the front door at home, I surveyed the scene with distaste. The minimally converted stable where I live was cold and untidy and unclean, battered leather furniture buried under newspapers, books and items of clothing put down, temporarily.

Friday night is the second-worst night for being on your own. Saturday night is the big one. By Sunday night, you think you’re getting the hang of it.

The answer lies in action. I switched on lights, checked the answering machine, got the heating going, went outside for firewood, started a blaze.

Looking for red wine in the unpacked boxes, I found the surviving bottle of ’89 Maglieri shiraz. It had been in an unopened carton not two metres from the explosive device that almost removed the top floor of my previous dwelling, an old boot factory in North Fitzroy. Eleven bottles fragmented, glass splinters travelling ten metres, a dark purple spray covering everything. The first people on the scene thought it was blood, enough 20

for at least two. But one bottle was mysteriously spared, a small abrasion on the label.

A memento of the end of another bit of my life.

Linda’s absence on the answering machine signalled the closing of yet another piece.

This wasn’t the moment for the Maglieri. That called for something to celebrate. The start of something new, perhaps. Now I was at the fag-end of something old. At the back of a cupboard, I found a bottle of Penfolds 128. About right. I put on a Charlie Parker CD.

Home. It means something when you have to do economy class time in planes, sit for hours in small hired cars, sleep in cardboard-walled hotel rooms sprayed with chemicals to mask the smell of other chemicals.

I cleared an armchair and sat down to eat in front of the fire, just in time to watch a weather report. It was delivered by a person who wanted to be a witty weatherperson, not a wise ambition for someone without wit. Still, he clearly relished what he did: waved a pointer vaguely while reading off placenames and temperatures from an electronic prompter. An idiot could do it and an idiot was doing it, a rare example of intellectual capacity and occupation dovetailing.

I fully intended to ring my sister but she beat me to it.

‘Jack,’ she said. ‘I’m in contact with the living Jack Irish? This is he? Him? Don’t tell me.

I’m going to faint.’ She paused. ‘Don’t flesh and blood mean anything to you?’

‘A piece of prime sirloin, well hung, it has meaning to me, yes.’

‘Well hung,’ she said. ‘Well hung’s just a memory. I’m lucky to meet badly hung. Hung at all is a blessing.’

‘The incredible shrinking men. You may be inside some kind of zone of contracting genitals. A beam from space. The aliens are clearing a landing ground in Toorak. First they shrink the dicks of the rich, then…’

‘They send in the alien shocktroops, humanoids hung like Danehill, to be ecstatically welcomed by the rich women. Speaking of rich women, how’s Linda?’

It wasn’t a question I wanted to be asked. I slid down the sofa, put my right foot out and moved a log closer to the core of the fire. ‘That’s not a question I wanted to be asked,’ I said.

‘You’ve answered it anyway. A friend of mine saw her with Rod Pringle at a television thing.’

21

Rod Pringle was the hottest thing in commercial television current affairs.

‘Just business,’ I said.

‘He kissed her ear.’

‘They’re like that in television. Kiss your ear, kiss your arse, kiss any part of you. Means nothing. Like size.’ I drank some red wine. It seemed to have gone sour.

‘Jack? You there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have told you that.’ A pause. ‘Here’s a number I’ve been looking for.

Madame Corniche.’

‘Please God,’ I said, ‘not seances. Recovered memories before seances.’

‘Cranial massage. Did you know the plates in your skull can be moved?’

‘Rosa,’ I said, ‘if the Good Lord wanted us to pay people to move our skull plates, he wouldn’t have given us the front bar of the Royal in Footscray. You want to eat one day? Lunch?’

‘You’re inviting me to eat? Soon you could be introducing me to your friends. Male friends.’

‘I don’t know any men I’d like to be related to by intercourse,’ I replied.

‘Don’t worry about it. I’d rather be introduced to men by a warder at Pentridge. Or wherever they put the crims now. Lingalonga Social Adjustment Facility Pty Ltd.’

‘They’ll be the same people I know,’ I said. ‘Former clients.’

‘Funny thing with lawyers,’ Rosa said. ‘The respectable ones I know don’t have former clients. They have clients. It’s only the ones like you who have former clients. Former because someone shot them dead or because you couldn’t keep them out of jail.’

‘Respectable?’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you knew respectable lawyers. Name one.’

‘I can name one. One of many. I was at the races with one two weeks ago, in fact.’

‘Laurie Phelan. I saw you at Flemington with Laurie Phelan.’

‘Exactly. A commercial lawyer. Why didn’t you show yourself?’

22

‘Trying to avoid guilt by association. Know what they call Laurie? They call him Mr Omo.

Why is that?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t want to know.’

‘Because he washes whiter than white. He launders money for drug dealers.’

There was a long silence.

‘Well,’ Rosa said, ‘he’s got nice hands.’

‘Must be using a kind soap powder. Donelli’s in Smith Street, Collingwood. Sunday, twelve-thirty. In the courtyard.’

‘Courtyard? A courtyard in Collingwood? I don’t think you’ve got a full grasp of the courtyard concept. They don’t have courtyards in Collingwood. Courtyards don’t have Hills hoists in the middle. With big old underpants and bloomers and bras like jockstraps for elephants hanging on them.’

‘Don’t bring Laurie Phelan.’

‘You bastard.’

I caught the last ten minutes of ‘On This Day’. Rod Pringle’s dense and shining hair kept sliding over his quizzical right eyebrow as he tried to get the Premier of New South Wales to concede that you could buy planning permission in Sydney’s western suburbs.

The Premier was confident, serious and convincing. Then an overhead camera zoomed in on his sweating scalp, showing the transplanted hair plugs, like an enhanced CIA satellite picture of a failing crop in Afghanistan. After that, he didn’t seem quite so convincing.

After a commercial, Linda came on, fetching in dark blue, standing in front of a flashy Sydney building. She pointed over her shoulder.

This building, called Cumulus, is Sydney’s newest and most dramatic. It belongs to a private company owned by one of the most private millionaires in Australia, Steven Levesque. We hear little about him from year to year. Yesterday, he came into the spotlight as the buyer of a forty per cent shareholding in Sanctum Corporation, the country’s fastest-growing property development company. But Mr Levesque is more than a businessman. He is also said to speak directly into ears at the highest levels of politics.

The camera cut to a vast minimalist office, dwelt for a moment upon a large Storrier canvas, then went to a man sitting behind a glowing slab of 300-year-old jarrah, a 23

handsome man in his forties, perfect navy suit, blue shirt, red tie, lean and tanned face, squared-off chin.