The Serpent's Sting (19 page)

As I walked into town, I prepared a story to cover my black eye. I concocted an unimaginative walking-into-a door-in-the-middle-of-the-night scenario. I thought, too, about Mrs Ferrell, the landlady. I'd never seen her. Geraldine had called her a termagant, but had said little else about her. It was difficult to construct any sort of criminal profile with nothing to go on beyond screams issuing from behind a closed door.

After the performance, which went well (and the audience was now noticeably female-heavy), Percy Wavel called all the cast onstage and gave us the bad news that we'd be expected to do a night-time performance on New Year's Eve — at Puckapunyal, of all places. I was fortunate in not being attached to the Tivoli shows. Many of the
Mother Goose
cast were exhausted by the number of performances they'd been required to give. Sunday, for example, ought to have been a day off, because theatres were closed. But Mr Wallace Parnell, the manager of the Tivoli, expected his players to entertain audiences six nights a week on the stage, and on Sunday nights to perform on radio. It was an exhausting regime. I was gaining a new respect for even my least favourite Tivoli comedians and singers. The Dunstan Sisters were spared the Sunday-night radio spot. They were exclusively a visual horror.

So we were to lose New Year's Eve as a holiday. At least I knew that I wouldn't need to go looking for Geraldine when we were at Puckapunyal. There were mutterings of discontent before the cast had to hurry off to the Tiv for the evening show. I was obliged to attend the stage door and sign autographs, and somehow my black eye excited admiration rather than disdain. I assured the fans that I'd come by it honestly while helping a fellow actor rehearse a fight scene. They cooed in sympathy.

I was sufficiently concerned about my stubborn headache to visit the family doctor in his rooms in Carlton. It was late when I arrived there, and the surgery was closed. However, Dr Spittler had been treating our family since I was a baby — I believe it was he who performed my circumcision, at the cost of three shillings (my mother kept the receipt; I have no idea why) — and he was very attached to Mother. He was a bachelor, and lived in the house above his rooms. I wasn't especially fond of Dr Spittler. The last time I'd called on his services, it had been for him to remove the cast from my broken arm after I'd returned from Maryborough, in Queensland. His sage, medical advice on that occasion had been that I should try to avoid falling over. He'd also reminded me, pointedly, that Mother had almost died having me, and that this imposed an obligation on me not to be a disappointment to her. Perhaps the Catholics were onto something with that St Monica nonsense.

Dr Spittler took me upstairs to his living room. He employed a woman who ‘did' every day, so the house was neat and spotless. As always when I looked at Dr Spittler, I had trouble imagining him as a young man. He had the sort of face that looked as if it had been fixed as an old one from a young age. The room smelled oppressively of cigarette smoke, and Dr Spittler practically lit one cigarette from another. His fingers, which probed both my black eye and the wound on the back of my head, were tanned with tar. He'd been a doctor for so long that he'd exhausted curiosity about his patients long ago, and he didn't ask how I came to have such injuries. I volunteered what was essentially the truth — that I'd been punched in the eye at one point in the evening, and hit with a blunt instrument later that same evening.

‘I see,' he said. ‘Well, I don't think you're concussed. Perhaps you twisted your neck when you fell. Why don't you take up smoking? That might help.'

I paid him, and went home to Mother's house.

Chapter Six

TURNS FOR THE WORSE

I SLEPT FITFULLY
. I ought to have reported Geraldine's appearance to the police. Her immediate disappearance, however, put me in an awkward spot. I felt a terrible dread that she would be found dead somewhere, and when this thought insinuated itself into my mind, it arrived with the ungracious suspicion that Geraldine may have taken something from my bedroom — an object which, if found on her body, would incriminate me. Those drawings were the source of this unbidden suspicion. I got out of bed, switched on the light, and searched my room. Was there anything missing? I had few belongings. As a travelling actor, I'd shed rather than accumulated things. There were a few photographs, but they all seemed to be there, although I couldn't be sure. It had been a while since I'd looked through them.

I had one small, talismanic object from my childhood, tucked away under my socks, in a drawer. Its intrinsic value was close enough to nothing, and no one but I knew its value to me. It was a small, white, ceramic bird, no bigger than a glass marble. It was a piece of clay, worked quickly with thumb and fingers, pushed into a plump, generalised bird shape, with a beak and wings delineated with a thumbnail. Painted, glazed, and fired, it was a simple, perfect object. I can't remember how I came by it. It had appeared at some stage in my childhood, and I loved the way it sat in the palm of my hand. This small bird was the most private part of me. When I travelled, I never took it with me. I didn't consider it a lucky object. It was more powerful than that. I always buried it, wrapped in a small square of cloth, in Mother's back yard, and exhumed it when I returned home. I can't explain why I did this, or why I'd invested so much meaning into this small orb of fired earth. It was there, under the socks. Even if Geraldine had been looking for something to take, there was nothing about my bird that would attach it to me. I don't believe any other person even knew of its existence. I picked it up, closed my fingers over it, and felt calm — well, calmer.

As soon as I'd put it back in a corner of the drawer, the dread about Geraldine's corpse returned. It wasn't, however, Geraldine's corpse that turned up in the morning. It was an altogether more unexpected body.

Cloris arrived at Mother's house early. It was Wednesday 30 December. I don't usually remember dates. I'm hopeless with birthdays, but Wednesday 30 December, 1942 is seared into my memory like an ugly, psychic brand. In the world beyond the one I inhabited, this is what was happening. The Russians were having some success in pushing the Germans back from Stalingrad; the Japanese thrust near Buna had been halted; and the eighth army was just 190 miles from Tripoli.

I'd had more than a glimpse in the Northern Territory of the hardships endured by soldiers, so newspaper headlines struck me forcefully, and I always imagined the individual suffering disguised by a bland banner such as ‘New Trap Closing Round Enemy'. This actually came down to poor bastards freezing and starving to death. I tried to keep the war at a distance, and I tried to limit its effect on me to the minor inconveniences of rationing and shortages. However, I'd endured the suffocating, enervating heat of Gulnare Bluff; its humidity was sufficient to drown in, and its great clouds of mosquitoes harried remorselessly. The young men, placed there secretly, their clothes falling off them with mould and rot, suffered with no hope of recognition or even of relief. I knew that war meant more than powdered egg, ersatz coffee, and female tram conductors.

I did not, I hope, take my job as an actor for granted. That day's paper, which I'd glanced through before Cloris's arrival, reminded me that there were other, more difficult ways of negotiating civilian life than the path I'd chosen. In Ballarat, two conscientious objectors had been jailed for six weeks for refusing to take the oath of service in the Citizen Forces. One of these men, a gardener, offered as his defence that he had to ‘obey God or lose my salvation. Anybody who disobeys God is eternally damned.' The other, a driver, and the father of four children, offered the court as an explanation for his flouting the law that, ‘Once you have definitely experienced salvation you cannot do otherwise than obey God. You have your duty, sir, the same as I have to the law of God. I feel very sorry for you.'

These were men of courage, I suppose, although I had no sympathy for their God bothering. They'd be dull dinner guests; humourless, dim-witted, and self-righteous. Martyrs are tedious people. This thought had just formed when there was a knock on the front door. I answered it because Brian hadn't yet come down, and Mother was back at Drummond Street. The morning sky was heavy with cloud cover, and quite cool. Cloris wasn't crying, but her face was set in a way that suggested it wouldn't take much to release tears.

‘I'm sorry it's so early,' she said.

‘Not at all. I'll rustle up Brian for you.'

‘No, Will. It's not Brian I've come to see. It's you.'

‘Really?' I hadn't meant to sound so surprised.

‘May I come in?'

‘Heavens. My manners. Please.'

I took Cloris into the front room. The blackouts were still up. I took them down and offered Cloris a cup of tea, which she refused. She immediately put me in a difficult position by asking if Brian had spoken to me about her brother. As she'd specifically asked him to keep their conversation private, I decided the best policy was to lie. The truth is only sometimes the best option.

‘No,' I said, and managed to sound puzzled, as though I couldn't imagine what Cloris might be talking about. She accepted the lie with satisfying ease, and took a deep breath.

‘I'm just going to jump right in, Will. My brother was a drug addict. No one knew this, except me. Dad had no idea. I don't know anything about drugs, but I know that the drug he was addicted to was heroin.'

‘I see.'

‘No, Will, you don't see. Drug addicts need to get their drugs from somewhere, and I think I know where John was getting his.'

She reached into her purse and withdrew a folded piece of paper. I recognised it at once as a playbill for the Tivoli Theatre. Cloris passed it to me. On the reverse side there was a quick sketch. It was of John Gilbert. The artist had skilfully delineated his features, and I recognised immediately Geraldine's very particular style. Even if I hadn't, she'd thoughtfully signed it, ‘Gerald. With all my love.'

‘John's never been interested in the theatre, Will, and he's certainly never shown any interest in the Tivoli. Until recently, that is. Maybe it's a coincidence, but until six months ago he hardly ever went out at night. Then he started missing dinner and coming home late. It didn't bother me, or even interest me, really. I had little in common with John. We didn't talk to each other much. There wasn't any antipathy between us; I think we just had nothing to say. I did John's washing, because Mum was ill, and there were stains on his cuffs and collars that were oily and hard to shift. It was greasepaint, so I knew he was seeing someone at the theatre. I caught him once, injecting something into his arm. I told Brian this. There were things I didn't tell him, but which I need to tell you, because I want the people who turned my brother into a drug addict to be brought to justice.'

There was the sound of a toilet flushing upstairs. Cloris looked nervously to the door.

‘It's all right,' I said. ‘Brian has a routine. He won't be down for a few minutes. Why do you think John was being supplied drugs by someone at the Tivoli?'

‘Of course, I don't know for sure,' she said. She looked again nervously at the door. ‘All I know is that his behaviour and routines changed at the same time as make-up starting appearing on his clothes. After I'd caught him with the syringe, he became quite frank with me about his habit. He didn't call it a habit, for a start. He called it regular use, and said it helped him manage things. He didn't elaborate on exactly what “things” he was managing.

‘
He wasn't in the least defensive about taking the drug. On the contrary, he offered to give me some heroin. You can drink it. You don't have to inject it. As I said, we didn't talk much, but he was talkative on the subject of heroin, which he didn't think ought to be illegal in the first place. That was the fault of the League of Nations, apparently. Oh, he railed at length about that. The League decided which drugs to regulate, not for any moral reason, but to protect the profits of big companies. That just played into the hands of criminals, of course, who took over the distribution of some drugs and turned people who used them into criminals as well. I didn't follow his argument closely. He was quite animated about it. All I knew was that he was acting differently from the way he usually did. Then I found that sketch.' She paused. ‘And there was another page of sketches as well.'

She reached again into her purse, and even before she handed the square of paper to me, I knew what it would contain. I wasn't disappointed. There were three, small drawings, each of them of a naked, reclining, male figure. The face wasn't recognisably John Gilbert's, and perhaps only an intimate of his could attest to the accuracy of the rest of him. They weren't pornographic, but they erred on the side of the louche rather than the academic. As with the portrait sketch, there was a dedication. This one left no doubt as to the sitter. ‘To John G. With love, Gerald.' Cloris waited a moment for me to take this in.

‘One of the things about my brother that I didn't know was that he was queer. Who is Gerald?'

‘Perhaps it will be some consolation to know that Gerald is a woman.'

‘A woman?'

‘Yes. Her name is Geraldine. Her friends call her Gerald.'

‘There are more of these drawings. Only this page was fit to show anyone. So you know this person?'

‘From the style of the drawing, particularly the well-handled foreshortening, I'm fairly certain that the artist is a woman in the
Mother Goose
company named Geraldine Buchanan.'

‘I want to meet her.'

‘There's rather a queue of people wanting to meet her. She's disappeared.'

‘Oh my. How dreadful. Oh, she was the girl who was going to come to Christmas lunch, but who didn't arrive. She was your friend, your …'

‘Not my girlfriend, Cloris.'

Cloris looked again at the sketches, and her face lost some of its colour.

‘I'm so sorry, Will. I feel embarrassed to have shown these to you. I didn't make the connection. You must think me utterly gauche.'

As if summoned by the word ‘gauche', Brian came into the room, and did a small double-take at the sight of Cloris. He hurriedly did up the buttons of his shirt. Cloris gathered the two pages of drawings in a frantic movement that drew attention to them as being of importance. Brian discreetly acted as if he hadn't noticed her rush to fold and stuff them into her purse.

‘How lovely to see you,' he said, as he fastened his top button and tucked his shirt into his trousers. ‘I wasn't expecting you. I try to be fully dressed for visitors, as a general rule.'

‘I was passing by,' Cloris said, lamely, ‘and I thought I'd pop in.'

Brian eased her discomfort by accepting the explanation as being perfectly reasonable and not requiring further interrogation.

‘A cup of tea?' he asked.

With noticeable relief, Cloris agreed that this would be lovely, and Brian retreated to the kitchen to prepare a pot.