Mrs Barnes edged across the room and reached into her pantry for a handful of long flat green leaves with sharp edges. With scissors, she cut the leaves into a teapot; then added hot water, replaced the lid, wrapped a cosy around the pot, and spun it round three times. She looked a member of Housewives’ Freemasonry. After a minute, I was looking warily at the dull-green liquid in my cup.
‘Lemongrass,’ Mrs Barnes said. ‘Try it.’
It was not half bad, somewhat lemony and refreshing, a little tame for someone with a caffeine dependency like mine.
‘You like my roses, Steele?’ the old woman asked when she saw me looking out the window in their direction. ‘So, what’s your favourite?’
I hadn’t been looking at her roses at all, and I had no favourite, as they all appeared to be the same white variety. I was only staring blankly into the mid distance, which I often do when enjoying a cuppa. Not wishing to offend, I focused on one rosebush, a little taller than the others, and with plenty of branches radiating from a fork in the trunk. Masses of smallish white blooms burst from among the green leaves. I nominated it as my fave.
‘It’s called Iraqi Icicle,’ Mrs Barnes said. They’re all Iraqi Icicles but I think that one’s the best, too.
‘A lot of what we think of as European roses came originally from the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. That’s around Iraq and Persia, you know, what we call Iran now.’
I complimented Mrs Barnes for running rings around me in roseology.
She went on. ‘You know, for some reason, many Australians think roses are English natives. They tell me many Americans think they originated in the southern United States. But they didn’t. I don’t think it’s right that the rose is the national flower of the United States. What do you think, Mr Hill?’
She sipped her lemongrass tea. I took a hearty swig of mine, feeling a little bored and uncomfortable, as you do when you are with someone who has a passion you do not share. ‘I never really thought about it, Mrs Barnes. I suppose they have had it as their national flower for a while.’
‘I don’t think it’s right, and there should be some international law against it. They must have plenty of plants, native to the United States that had been there for centuries before they brought in roses. Why didn’t they choose one of those? That would be right.’
Amelia Barnes had lived in one of the ground-floor flats since long before I moved in. Neighbours for years, we were polite without really knowing each other. It was not until our rosy morning tea that I discovered she was widowed.
‘Clarrie planted the roses. He was tending them when he passed on,’ Mrs Barnes told me. ‘I took over because, when he died, they were still young, just babies really. I suppose you could say I’m completing my husband’s unfinished business.’
She sipped. I sipped. I looked around at the family pictures on walls and on little tables in the small room. Clarrie was not smiling in many of the photos; perhaps he was camera shy. Still, in death, he was one of the lucky ones. His memory lived among the Iraqi Icicles as well as in his uncomfortable family photos.
The old woman put her cup down and her face grew stern. ‘But the aphids always come for them.’
I had heard the name aphids before, but they certainly weren’t something I’d given much thought to.
Mrs Barnes knew a fair bit about the creatures, pests that attacked plants, including roses, especially relishing the new shoots and buds. ‘Aphids are very tiny; many don’t have wings, so they can’t climb rosebushes very well to get at the new shoots and petals. Ants give them a ride up the roses.’
Now this was interesting: a couple of Nature’s creatures striking a deal for their mutual benefit. You would think such a contract would require human intelligence, but obviously not.
‘The ants farm the tiny aphids,’ Mrs Barnes said softly, warming to her subject, ‘and protect them from predators such as lady beetles. Ants are like us humans, Steele. They don’t mind making war, even against their own kind. Raising an army, that’s unusual in nature, Steele, but ants do it. We do too.’
I took Mrs Barnes’s word for it, but I had a question. ‘Sounds great for the aphids, Mrs Barnes, but what’s in it for the ants?’
‘Oil.’
‘Oil?’
‘Oil. After feeding on the rosebuds, aphids secrete a sweet, oily substance sometimes called honeydew. The ants love this sweet oil, and for some species it is a basic part of their diet.’
‘Everybody wins,’ I said.
‘Everybody except the roses,’ Mrs Barnes said. ‘The arrangement does not do much for the Iraqi Icicles.’
___o0o___
I WAVED WEAKLY to Mrs Barnes as she sprinkled a powder on the roses in her relentless war against the aphids. I would have liked Mooney and Schmidt to let me walk rather than push me to the unmarked police car. I have a certain standing, however wobbly, in my community, and Mrs Barnes might misinterpret my helping the detectives with their inquiries. She looked up at me, wedged between the two detectives.
‘It’s criminal,’ she said. ‘Bloody aphids.’
16
FROM THE MOUNTAINTOP we could see over the whole of Brisbane, up and down the Brisbane River, round and round the bends, all the way out to Moreton Bay. Senior Constable Schmidt had driven Sergeant Mooney and me past the city’s botanical gardens to Mount Coot-tha. The mountain, modest in height, is home to three of Brisbane’s television stations. It is also known as a lovers’ lane. Mooney and Schmidt knew it as a place to show someone a hundred-metre sheer drop.
They parked the piggy bank on a side clearing. We only had to move ten metres to be on the edge of the rock-encrusted cliff. You’d be a thousand-to-one to survive a fall from the top of that cliff.
Mooney did the talking. ‘It’s like this, Hill. You’re a clown and a pest.’ He arced his arm proprietorially over the city. ‘We’ve got people out there who are murdering and maiming, robbing and pillaging.’
‘Maybe you should tighten up your police recruitment procedures.’ Sometimes I have no control over my mouth.
‘That sort of smart-arse comment is what I’m on about,’ said Mooney. ‘You’re too lazy to work and too gutless to break and enter like an honest grub crim.’
Eloquent man that Mooney, he must have kissed the Blarney Stone.
‘Then you go stuffing up our day of grub-catching by killing Marcus Georgio.’
Mooney stopped talking and looked hard at me. I returned a blank look. He grabbed a handful of my shirt, twisted it and thumped me in the chest.
‘Hey!’ he shouted, while he pushed me back and forth.
I know he meant nothing by it; it was just a copper’s way of emphasising a point. He thumped me in the chest again. ‘Hey!’ the sergeant repeated.
Me, I still looked blankly at him. Schmidt intervened, grabbing hold of Mooney’s wrist. ‘Hang on, Frank.’
Oh Buddha, I thought, not this good cop, bad cop shit. Yes it was.
‘Hang on nothing; I’m gunna throw this shithead right off this mountain.’
Mooney pulled me by the shirt towards him, spun me around, grabbed my shirt again and pushed me away from him, into the empty air beside the cliff. The colour deserted my face, leaving me white. Buddha, we were talking mass-produced polyester cotton shirt here. That cloth could have ripped apart in the copper’s hands and sent me to the gambler’s dreamtime.
My fear seemed to restore a semblance of sanity to Mooney. He turned me around again, released his grip and lit up a cigarette. Schmidt moved towards me.
‘What the fuck, Steele,’ the Senior Constable sympathised, shaking his head. ‘So Georgio was a Mr Hollywood wanker, it’s still gunna cost you twelve years. Christ, you’ll end up doing at least eight.’
By this time, my heartbeat had steadied from a gallop to a canter. I started to smell fish and it wasn’t coming from Moreton Bay which I could see in the distance. What were we doing having this conversation on Mount Coot-tha, rather than in police headquarters
in Roma Street? I decided indignation, despite my fear, was the way to go. ‘I haven’t a clue what you’re on about. Mooney just scared the shitter out of me. He’s still scaring the shitter out of me. And all I know I’ve done is win at cards last night.’
Mooney perked up at the mention of his name. He brushed Schmidt aside and pulled a metal object from his pocket. ‘Seen this before, Fuckface Clown?’
I could not help but stare dumbly down at that police .38, just like the one I had thrown in Schulz Canal.
‘Where do you think we found this?’ Mooney asked.
I was glad he did. There is nothing like a question from a copper to get your mind back on track.
‘It’s one of yours, isn’t it? I suppose you found it wherever you keep daddy’s little helper.’
Mooney grabbed and twisted my shirt again. It had worked last time, hadn’t it? ‘We found it in your garbage bin.’
Well Buddha, that was it. These coppers had set me up for a murder. Watched me take the gun away; watched me throw it in the creek. They’d fetched it out and shoved it in my garbage bin. This was a top fit-up, and I needed to find out what trading cards we were playing with.
‘Awlright,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you what happened.’
‘Shut up,’ said Mooney.
He threw the gun high into the air and it skidded down the cliff. No living person would ever see that gun again.
‘Here’s what’s happening,’ Mooney said. ‘I’m counting to twenty. You’re going away and not coming back unless you know 150 percent that I’ll let you. I mean, if you come back before you know I’ll let you back, I’m gunna drag you by the balls all the way up this cliff and throw you off. You got that?’
I didn’t get anything. I didn’t know what was going on. I looked to Schmidt to see if he could interpret. He shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know what was going on either. Mooney held all the cards and he was hiding most of them.
‘I’m counting to twenty, and you’d better be gone when I’m finished.’ Mooney grabbed the palm of my hand, turned it over and started counting. Imagine terror by numbers ‘. . . five, six, seven, and eight . . .’ I wanted to leave, but Mooney would not let go of my hand.
On top of Mount Coot-tha, I was the most frightened I have ever been in my life. ‘. . . nineteen, twenty.’ Sergeant Frank Mooney had just deposited two thousand dollars in my hand and walked away.
It was a fair hike from the summit of Mount Coot-tha to Hendra. I never wear a watch, but it must have taken nearly four hours and that’s with grabbing a bus for a couple of kays.
I could have caught a cab when I hit the bottom of the mountain, but I needed to walk more, and think. Apart from Gooroo, Marcus Georgio was the person I had the most sense from that day. And he was dead. Everybody wanted to tell me it was odds on I did him in.
All I needed to top that off was sixteen kilometres of some cabbie telling me it was the feminists or Asians or politicians or Aboriginals or public servants or a combination of the aforesaid who set me up.
Maybe it was the public servants, or one public servant: Ms Kathy Billings.
On my walk, I was thinking how odd it was Ms Billings gave me about 16-hours’ notice of my appointment with Caulfield Jones. In my experience of the public services, the gears grind slowly and there appear to be a heap of review staff.
Surely one of Ms Billings’ supervisors would have said, ‘Hang on you have to give Hill more notice than that.’ It is quite possible they stuffed around with my file for so long they had given me plenty of time but that time had run out. One way to find out what happened . . .
___o0o___
MOST PUBLIC SERVICE BUILDINGS have a security guard at a desk in the foyer. It has been like that since some psycho blew away a mob of office workers in Melbourne. I was hovering over a retired army officer supplementing his service pension by sitting behind a desk trying to vet the harmless loons from the harmful ones.
I gestured with my open palms that I was no trouble at all. It was 5:30 p.m. so he had to be near the end of his shift. He would be itching to catch the 7 p.m. news on the ABC, to see how many charred bodies had been sacrificed in the northern Victorian bushfires.
I was polite and deferential. ‘My cousin Kathy Billings has invited me to the inter-office smoko. Is that awlright?’
‘They’re on the roof,’ he yawned, and didn’t even bother to cover his mouth.
I yawned, too. Hours into a bad dream, I was dead tired. ‘What floor is that? I’m from Victoria,’ I apologised.
He nodded. He knew all about directionless Victorians trying to take over Queensland after they had stuffed their own state senseless. You had to feel sympathy when one of them could not work out that the roof would be the top floor of a building.
‘Twenty-eight,’ he yawned again.
‘Thanks,’ I yawned in reply.
The lift opened to show me Kathy Billings’ back retreating towards a concrete platform seat in the middle of the roof, enclosed on four sides by concrete walls. Buddha, twenty-eight floors! If we don’t stop these developers, they’ll build a skyscraper so tall we can all stand in line for our turn to shake hands with God.
Billings put her vodka-and-orange on the concrete beneath her seat. She sat down between two bucks whom she was probably playing off against each other. The bucks were drinking spring water, and trying to make an impression. Time for some orphan bastard to shake up the studs.
‘Kathy, you’re looking great,’ I said, picking up her vodka and handing it to her.
I could see by her eyes it wasn’t her first.
She waved her finger, trying to place me. I put my hand over that finger and reminded Kathy it was rude to point. The studs looked across at each other to agree I was not welcome. Forty other public servants stood around in groups, complaining about work and talking extra-curricular bullshit. A surprised facial expression, slowly fading, showed that Ms Billings recognised me. I did not want the studs to do their macho shit and give me the boot, so I threw in a wrong ’un.
‘Come over here, Kathy, and I will tell you what happened to Jenny.’
I grabbed her vodka and used it as a carrot to entice her to a corner of the building, where we were higher than smog.
‘Who’s Jenny?’ she asked, as she obligingly eased into a corner of the concrete rectangle.
‘Don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Remember me?’
‘Yair, I saw you yesterday. You’re Steele Hill, a beno.’
‘Beno?’ I asked.
‘Beno, as in unemployment beneficiary. Only we can’t call you that any more. Now you’re a client.’
‘Thanks for the promotion.’
I got down to business. ‘Have the police seen you?’
‘The police, why?’ she asked, convincingly enough.
‘You know that job you sent me to.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ she said in mock sympathy. ‘You didn’t get it.’
‘No, I didn’t, but my prospective employer did. Someone shot him full of mortal holes.’
I wasn’t sure whether she was surprised or excited by this choice gossip. Whichever, she did not say a word, just waited for more information. She would have to wait, because that was exactly what I wanted from her.
‘When he rang up about the job, did that Jones bloke mention me by name?’
‘Would you like a drink?’ she replied, ignoring my question.
Apparently, years ago, when you joined the public service, you swore an oath to the Queen of the Commonwealth. Now, in the early nineties, it seems that you swear an oath to always ask the questions.
I played question for question.
‘Have you got any wine?’
Billings brushed me aside, moving towards the makeshift bar, and I followed. She turned her head.
‘Are you following me?’
You bet. In some ways, the modern woman can be surprisingly old-fashioned, like screaming for the coppers, only using a mobile phone to do it.
‘R
ed or white?’ she asked.
The wine came from that young vineyard, chateau de cardboard, so I just tapped the nearest cask.
When we retired to our corner again, it was my turn to ask a question.
‘So, how long have you known Marcus Georgio?’
‘Who?’ she slurred, as though genuinely trying to follow my erratic conversation.
So much for the Gooroo theory of a deranged stiff out there, knocking off a cheating hustler.
‘Look, I shouldn’t have crashed your party. Ever since I ran into that defrocked nun who told me I was John Lennon’s lovechild, I sometimes tend to indulge in inappropriate behaviour.’
I could see her face perk up at the Lennon angle, so I followed up with my usual disclaimer: ‘I don’t really believe I’m Lennon’s lovechild, myself, but . . .’ The graceful shrug of my shoulders suggested it was a real possibility.
I suppose there was some chance chronologically, given the timing of the Beatles’ visit to Brisbane. But I would not put five cents on it myself. Still, it was one of my proudest creative fictions, and had the desired result of gaining Ms Billings’ full attention. I wanted a brief yet truthful account of her place in my life.
‘Tell me a bit about this job you lined up for me and I’ll go.’
Kathy tried to concentrate, which was her mistake and mine, as introspection seemed to remind her of who was who in this relationship. She turned on me.
‘You seem like a nice guy, Steele, but if you think I worry a shit about your problems, you’ve got me confused with someone who gives a fuck. So I gave you a hard time about this job referral. I wasn’t going to follow it up. What do you think? I’m going to be stuck in that shitbox suburban office all my life? Do you know how many women have been the head of the department in Queensland? Come on, Steele, have a guess. How many women have been the head of the Department of Employment in Queensland? Just have a guess.’
Well, I knew the correct answer had to be none or close to it, and that I was a thoughtless bastard as well. Worrying about doing a lousy ten-to-fifteen years for someone else’s murder, when this woman was about to change the course of Queensland history.
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