by Peter Carey
You don't know what you're looking at, said Sheridan when I had confessed my feelings. You're lucky I'm with you.
I'm looking at ugly houses and a dreary railway line.
Yes, he said, and we came around a corner and he pulled the Merc languidly off the road. A coal truck blasted its horn and buffeted us.
Bring that tape recorder, said Sheridan and climbed out. I followed him a few yards, the tape recorder in my hand. He escorted me to a tall gum.
Everything is hidden, said Sheridan, a mite pompously in my opinion. He gazed up into the umbrella of the tree.
Oh give us a break, I said, I've lived in the bush, Sheridan. This isn't the first gum tree I ever saw. I can recognise a koala's arse as well as anyone.
Where's the koala?
In answer two small droppings fell from the tree, bouncing on the lower branches and landing in the litter of the bush floor.
Sheridan raised his eyebrows at me. I suppose you know what I'm going to say next?
That the koala has even reduced the size of its brain to save on energy?
Will you turn on your tape recorder?
Why?
I heard that's what you were doing with Jack Ledoux.
I was shocked to see his eyes were blazing. He waited, his arms folded across his chest, until I had turned on the tape.
Now you can't write the name of the town, he began, but in one of these towns along here there is a pub where all the young fellows hang out. I like this pub, Pete, but it can be a pretty rough sort of a place and one night there is a brawl and this big raw-boned bastard, let's call him Lurch . . .
Sheridan . . .
This fellow Lurch, said Sheridan firmly, knocks the shit out of one of the young fellows. Now Lurch is not only handy with his fists, he is a great mate of the local cops, so he feels pretty safe, but in his great excitement he forgets that the poor fuck whose jaw he is busy breaking just happens to be the son of the shire president.
So when the kid has to be hospitalised his old man doesn't take it lightly. He lays charges against Lurch and then he fucking sues him, and Lurch is down the gurgler to the sum of sixty fucking thousand dollars.
Sheridan, why don't we do this later?
No, listen, said Sheridan, taking the tape recorder from my hand and speaking so directly into it that the tape still reproduces the sound of his saliva and the slight whistle of his breath. Lurch then goes on to have a very successful earth-moving business. Soon he has ten trucks and front-end loaders and bulldozers and a couple of Bobcats. So the sixty thousand dollars has not crippled him, but he cannot forgive the kid. He hates this kid. Hates him, said Sheridan. And his friend the cop hates him too, see? They don't let him forget it either. They tell him, one day we'll get you, you bastard.
This is nuts. Let's sit in the car.
No. Now it's four years later and the kid who we will call . . .Paul, Paul and his mate go driving in his old man's perfectly restored '57 Chevrolet. This is a very precious piece of car and the boys are by now twenty-two, twenty-three years old and to cut a long story short they get piss-faced drunk and at four in the morning, with Paul at the wheel, the Chev leaves the road at speed . . .
Sheridan takes my arm and leads me around the tree to show me an ugly scar.
Right here, see, Pete. See.
We stand side by side staring at the tree.
They died?
Should have. This happens two hours before dawn. The road is deserted. It is freezing cold and foggy. But it is worse than that because Paul's mate has broken both his wrists.
Paul is piss-faced drunk but he knows he has given Lurch and the cop what they are waiting for. He has to get his mate to a hospital and when he does that the accident will be reported to the cops. One day we'll get you, you bastard. He knows he is going to go to jail.
His friend's name is Skink. He's a fabulous banjo player, but there is not a lot of him, hence the name. He's a skinny little lizard of a fellow and now the poor little bugger is lying on the frosty ground and both his wrists are shattered and he is in agony.
Don't worry, mate, says Paul, I'll walk into town and get an ambulance.
No you bloody won't, mate, says Skink.
Yes I bloody will.
No you bloody won't because if you do they'll put you in the bloody slammer and throw away the key.
Yes, I'm fucked.
Skink is one of them little freckle-faced fellows with sticky-out ears. You wouldn't expect big things of him, but now he tells Paul what he is going to do.
You're going to walk up the bloody road here, he says, and he directs him to that farm up there, you see that red old shed, just past there. That's my uncle's farm, says the kid. You wake him up and tell him you are taking his Fiat tractor and then you bring it back here.
I never drove a tractor.
You ain't got no fucking choice, mate, you're going to tow this bloody car away and I will tell you where you can put it where that fucking cop won't ever find it.
And this little skimpy kid lies there, on this very spot, Pete, in the dark, in the fog. Can you imagine the pain? He lay on this spot while his friend came back with the tractor and then he waited while he towed the car away and hid it and then he waited for him to come back and drive him to hospital. Five hours that took.
That's a friendship, Pete. Do you have friends like that in New York City? I hope you do, mate. His fierce dark eyes were glistening. I have friends like that, he said, and then looked sharply away, as if embarrassed.
In the car again, he gave me back my tape recorder. See, I know what you're going to do with this fucking book. You're going to tell everyone how bent we are. I know this shit of yours. Convict colony, Rum Corps, etc., etc. Well, put in that story about those boys. That's Sydney for you, Peter. It's mates.
What will I say about the cop?
Oh don't you dare, cried Sheridan. Don't you dare make this a story about bent cops. You know I cannot bear it when you pull that shit.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE SUBJECT OF THE New South Wales police force is a long and complicated one, more suited to Royal Commissions than a narrative like this. But the issue of corruption in Sydney is so pervasive that you cannot put your spade into the earth without coming up against it.
Here, a random witness - my friend, Geordie Levinson.
In 1974, said Geordie, who is exactly five foot four, I moved to Paddington with my girlfriend Sasha McPhee - a very tall girl. Sasha was mad about motor-cycles and she had a $700 trail bike which one morning was . . . simply not outside the house.
Of course it had been stolen and that was, to say the least, a nuisance. It was not insured and neither of us had much money. We'd just arrived from Melbourne and lots of things were wrong already. We didn't like where we were living. We were sharing the house. And now. . . $700 down the drain.
Sasha emptied her bank account and bought a second bike, and this time she insured it. Not long afterwards, ie a week, this second machine vanishes too.
The ink is not dry on the insurance claim when there is a knock on the door and this fellow introduces himself. Do you want his name? I'll make one up for you - Barry Williams.
So he says, hello, I'm Barry Williams.
I ask him what he wants.
You've lost a bike.
Yes, I said. We have. In fact we've lost two of them.
He seemed very pleasant, charming. He was well dressed too - Gucci loafers, chinos, polo shirt. Well, he said, if you come with me you can have your bike back.
So Sasha went with him and before too long the pair of them have returned and Sasha has the missing bike. Wires have been cut and are hanging off, but otherwise it's all in one piece.
So Sasha makes tea and the three of us sit at the kitchen table and she says to him, thank you very much.
Naturally I'm very curious about this transaction so, when neither of them explain it, I ask.
Well, says Sasha, Barry took me to a car park just up the road and
the basement level is just full of bikes.
That's correct, says Barry. It's chocka.
And, says Sasha, Barry said here's your bike from the other night. You can have it back.
I did, says Barry. That's exactly what I said.
And I said, said Sasha, why are you giving it back?
And I said, Barry smiles, it seemed bad luck to lose two.
And I said, says Sasha, so you took the other one? And he said yes and so I ask him, why are you giving this one back?
Because, says Barry Williams, who was now sipping tea at my kitchen table, there's a glut on the market. More than we can sell. Also, she lost two.
I turned to Sasha but she only shrugged. Later I discovered that her only annoyance was that she had gotten back the one that was insured.
But I was upset, said Geordie, and I said to Barry Williams, what makes you think I wouldn't report this to the police?
He seemed astonished I would ask such a question. Why would you do that? You've got your bike back. Here we are, having a cup of tea. Anyway, it wouldn't do you any good.
But this is outrageous.
Well go to the cops if you like, mate. I'm just telling you, it won't do you any good.
Anyway, he was very calm. He took his time to finish his tea and when he left he shook my hand and wished me good luck. Meaning, I assumed, good luck with the police.
The instant he was gone I phoned Paddington police. They said they were the uniformed police, I better talk to the detectives, and so they gave me another number.
It took a long time for the detectives' phone to be picked up but finally a man answered. He didn't seem very interested. He said that someone would get back to me.
When? Tonight? Tomorrow?
Oh no, someone will get back to you.
But I was the only one who ever did any getting back. Not that it did me any good. Whenever I got hold of a detective, it always turned out to be the wrong person.
I forgot about it after a while and it would have been six months later that I called them again. But still I couldn't get them to pay attention.
Anyway, sometime later I'm walking down the street in Paddington and I run into Barry Williams and I say, hi, what are you doing around here?
And he says, oh we're dismantling this fence. And it was a bluestone wall. And it looked terrific, it was a beautiful wall.
Are you taking it away?
Yes.
What for?
A commission.
A commission?
Yes, the owners are on holiday and we're taking the wall on commission for some people who want it.
Sometime later, said Geordie, there's a drinks party in the Eastern Suburbs. Beautiful house. Chandeliers. The people's name is Williams, and I say to my friend Victoria, these couldn't be any relation to Barry Williams?
That's the family. This is his parents' house.
No sooner has she said it, said Geordie, than I see Barry himself coming through the crowd.
That Barry Williams? But he's a crook in Paddington.
Yes, she said. He went to school at Cranbrook. He was there with so and so and so and so. And she reels off all these names of very wealthy people.
So why is he a thief?
Shush.
Barry catches sight of us, said Geordie, and he comes over, kisses Victoria on the cheek, shakes my hand as if we're old friends now. And in a strange way we are. That's Sydney, we're all so very intimately connected.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IF YOU MAKE THIS book about yuppies like Geordie Levinson, said Sheridan, how can you expect to be taken seriously - he's not even from Sydney.
He's lived here twenty-five years.
Oh come on, Peter. He drives a Ferrari.
It was a Dino. Do you know how long ago that was?
Don't talk like a car dealer, said Sheridan who was now steering his great Queen Mother of a Merc down into the Megalong Valley. I don't give a fuck what he drives.
He was my lawyer. He still is my lawyer. You get to know a person very well that way. He is one of the most decent, fair-minded men I ever met.
He's a snob.
Sheridan, you've never spoken more than twenty words to him. Did he offend you in some way?
To be honest, Pete . . . he's five foot four.
Jesus, Sheridan.
As we left the heights of the mountain escarpment and descended through the coachwood forest, the chopped sunlight fell in bright slices across the chalky hood of the Merc. We had fleeting glimpses of the sandstone walls of the Blue Mountains rising above us, but we were no longer 'in the mountains'. As we came into the wider flatter land of the valley we left the bitumen and entered a dirt road and then a number of successively rougher dirt tracks until, after one particularly rocky passage, we stopped in front of a high and excessively complicated gate which bore all the marks of Sheridan's ingenious mind.
Once we were through this obstacle I asked him if we were now on his property but he was preoccupied with preserving the Merc's muffler. He swung on and off the track, unsuccessfully trying to avoid the rocks. When, after one violent thud, he cursed and stopped, it did not occur to me that we had arrived.
You should get a four-wheel drive, I said.
Sheridan turned those dark hurt eyes upon me. The thing is, Pete, how does Geordie pull those chicks? What is he? Fifty? Fifty-five?
There was no point in telling him that Geordie now drove a Volvo station wagon, or that he was the father of three little boys. Geordie's current happiness would not have comforted my friend today.
Sheridan, I asked, are you OK?
He turned off the engine and, in the silence, bestowed upon me a sweet strained smile. Home sweet home, he said.
But there was no sign of any home and what sweetness there was in the over-grazed paddock was not immediately obvious.
Stuff to carry, he said.
I was soon loaded up with wine bottles and books and a very bloody leg of lamb around which the flies immediately clustered.
Where's the cave?
It's here.
Now I followed Sheridan's broad back through a landscape quite unlike the one I had expected. Mind you, it suited him. It was a perfect habitat for an old hippie -plenty of sedge, thriving blackberry patch with wattles growing through its centre, rusted-out water tank, fenced dam with four-year-old blue-gum saplings growing around its edge, and beside the cattle pad we walked along, signs of Sheridan's considerable energy - fenced plantings of hakeas, grevilleas, eucalypts. It was not what I had pictured when I imagined a cave in 'the mountains'. I had thought of something deep into the escarpment, a place where you could see the marks where Australia tore itself away from New Zealand.
The cattle pad swung to the left along the contour of a hill but we continued upwards, and there it was - the cave.
It did not look like a cave but a garden shed buried in a hillside. There were plastic buckets everywhere around, and spades and hoes leaning against its windows. It was a cave, of course, with sandstone walls and a great slab of sandstone across its roof. Sheridan with his typical industry had framed out the mouth, building a wall, windows and a door. The result was a big rock-walled room that you could only call cosy. It was a little musty, true, but he quickly laid a fire in his stove. He lit the gas lamp and the refrigerator. He set a kettle on the primus stove. There were two over-stuffed armchairs but I chose to sit on the straight-backed wooden chair behind the desk and looked out through the dusty glass. Far in the distance the light caught the escarpment at Katoomba.
This is where you write?
This book has been a disaster, said Sheridan quietly. It is a total fucking disaster.
I thought you had a publisher.
I do, I do have a publisher.
Congratulations.
No, he said vehemently, I swapped my marriage for a publisher. I came up here for three years and now it is done I haven't got a fucking marriage and all I have is a book. Do you know what she
said to me - you burned up all my goodwill. What the fuck does that mean?
But I thought Clara was the one who wanted you to get out of soaps. She thought you were wasting yourself.
Well, she did give that impression, Pete. But while I came up here to write the book she was working eighteen-hour days. She did not complain until she hated me.
That seems unfair.
It's not to do with fair, mate, it's all about her father. I'd kill the fuck if he was not dead already.
I'm sorry, I said.
The truth is, I hate this place now, Pete. I used to be so happy when I was here, but now it feels like a tomb.
But you've always loved the mountains.
Yes, he said, I have always loved the mountains. I sort of had the idea that I belonged here.
My brother still farms up towards Lithgow. My grandfather had his first selection in this district. When he was a young fellow he went dancing in a cave not far from here. That was not a cave like this, it was a huge, deep cavern with a proper sprung floor that the cattlemen built. When you see it, you'll marvel at it, the things that men will do for sex. Yes, this is my place, but I should never have written the book. Even if it turns out I have written Ulysses, I regret it. I'd rather be writing soaps again. I wouldn't argue with the cunts this time around.
He held out his hand but I did not understand what he wanted.
Give me your tape bloody recorder.
Why?
Why do you think? I'm going to give you your fucking Earth story. He snatched the tape recorder from my hand and, having turned it on, sat beside me at the table.
You know, he said, on the day after she said her goodwill had been burned, I came up to abseil down Danae Canyon.
Let me explain some shit to you. Well, first you know Sydney sandstone is very soft. It's a soft bastard so the creeks cut through it like a knife through butter. You'll have a little creek that started out its life running along at the bottom of a V but over the years it cuts down and it cuts down until the V has become a Y and the shaft of the Y may be only six foot across but it can be hundreds of feet deep and the walls are all eroded in the most beautiful sculpted shapes, and on the sides you'll get hanging gardens of ferns, and spiders and lizards that don't live anywhere else in the world, that have perhaps lived here for a hundred thousand years. It was my mate Skink who got me into this.