The Promise

by Tony Birch

  ‘My wife died of cancer three years ago. She’d been sick for several years. It may not be quite the same, but I do know that it takes time when you lose someone …’

  He sat upright in his chair. I wanted to say something but the words were stuck in my throat. I looked out at the ledge for the bird. It was gone. ‘It was an accident,’ I eventually croaked. What I’d said made no sense to me, so I didn’t expect him to understand. I prised myself from the chair, hurriedly excused myself and left the office.

  I talked to Emma about the meeting later that night as she sat in bed reading.

  ‘What meeting? You didn’t tell me about a meeting,’ she questioned.

  ‘I forgot.’

  ‘Forgot?’ she frowned. ‘So, will you take up his offer, to work from home?’ She hesitated. ‘I think it would be good for you.’

  She took hold of my hand, squeezed it tightly and smiled. I felt guilty. She was holding the family together on her own.

  I sent a couple of projects into the office over the following weeks, and was invited to the next monthly meeting. Again I took the train into the city and had every intention of turning up at the meeting. As I was standing on the escalator, leaving the underground station, I looked up at the square of open sky above me and was struck with a familiar sense of anxiety. I grasped the front of my shirt and rested against a lamppost at the intersection across the street from my building. I waited on the corner and watched as the lights changed several times. Eventually I turned around and headed in the opposite direction from the office.

  I walked the streets of the city, occasionally stopping to look at a shop window display, eventually finding myself outside Bernard’s Magic Shop on Elizabeth Street. My father had taken me there with my older brother, Christopher, when we were small boys. Like most children, I was mesmerised by magic, while Chris was ever the cynic. I’d once been at a magic show at the local town hall. He’d been sitting behind me with a couple of mates, and had leaned across and screamed in my ear, ‘It’s only a trick, Nicky; it’s all a trick. None of this is true.’

  I’d felt betrayed by what he’d said. He’d robbed me of something precious and I never forgave him.

  My stomach began rumbling. I was hungry, but had been too nervous to eat breakfast that morning and had eaten nothing since. I walked past several crowded cafés before choosing one that had only single bar stools in the front window. Inside, I ordered a sandwich, ate quickly and left.

  Returning to the train station I heard the ringing of church bells above the noise of city traffic. The sound reminded me of the bell that hung atop the Catholic church a few streets from my childhood home. The bell would ring out each weekday morning announcing eleven o’clock mass, and four times on Sundays, once for each mass. Although my parents were not religious they insisted on sending Chris and me to the Catholic school next to the church, to ‘keep us in order’, my father claimed. He dragged us from our beds early on Sunday mornings, forcing us to nine o’clock mass and a front pew, where we would be sure to catch the eye of the nuns who taught us.

  I followed the sound of the bells across Elizabeth Street and stopped in front of a wrought-iron gate leading into a churchyard, before walking through the darkened wood-panelled entrance of the church. Although mass was not being said the church was almost full. I rested against the back pew and watched as people came and went. Some dropped to their knees and prayed with rosary beads entwined around their clasped hands, while others sat quietly with heads rested in their hands and their eyes closed.

  With little understanding of what I was doing, I walked along a side aisle and approached a seat, unable to recall if I was supposed to kneel, make the sign of the cross, or do both. After some confusion I did neither. Although I have only a slight build, as I sat down I felt the full weight of my body. The oak pew creaked loudly in response. Feeling weary, I rested my head against the back of the pew and looked up at the timber panelling in the ceiling above the altar. The inlay of each oak panel had been finished in brightly painted gold stars on a blue background.

  I woke to the sound of the church bells, sat up and wiped saliva from my chin. A woman was kneeling next to me, quietly reciting a prayer to herself. She picked at a strand of wool on the sleeve of the cardigan she was wearing. It began to unravel. I stood up, walked back along the aisle and was about to pass by the side nave when I stopped. It was aglow with many hundreds of candles burning on a series of metal tiers on both sides of a small altar. A kaleidoscope of colours projected onto a wall above, the effect of the afternoon sun touching a stained-glass window.

  I picked up a candle – it resembled a parched finger bone – and lit its wick from another before placing it on the topmost tier. As I did so the melting wax dripping from the next candle bled onto the back of my hand and scalded my skin. I suddenly felt that I needed to sit again. I looked up at the window, and read the inscription bordering it – Refuge of Sinners. I closed my eyes and thought about my son.

  THE GHOST OF HANK WILLIAMS

  Curtis played a deadly twelve-string guitar out front of the old Lido Ballroom on Saturday mornings, picking up a few dollars from the market shoppers. He could really sing too, a few years back – country and western, and some blues – but now his voice was shot, along with his body and he just sort of wailed and grunted. The guitar had seen better days, too. He’d been hit over the head with it more than once, mouthing off on the grog. It was flattened one time when Thin Lizzie, one of the girls who worked Banana Alley, serving high and low rollers out of the casino, slipped from a stool in the front bar of the Blue Oyster and landed tits up on the axe.

  He’d repaired the guitar over and over with some string, electrical tape and a prayer. There wasn’t a musician on earth who could have willed a decent tune out of that guitar after all the abuse it had taken. Except for Curtis. He could get it to weep like a mother who’d lost a newborn. Some say the rock-hard and ruinous life he’d led had destroyed his playing. I reckon it made him better.

  In his younger days there wasn’t a drug known to man that Curtis hadn’t fallen for. He’d survived his suicidal habits and the pals he’d cut loose with over the years – Big Tiny Johnson, Lenny the Leper and Ringo Moss among them. Big Tiny, all twenty stone of him, could sing like a bird. Him and Curtis had travelled the road and played in every country pub from Melbourne to the Gulf and back, making just enough to keep their wild side cared for, until Big Tiny died in his sleep after a three-day bender on the streets of Sydney.

  Curtis had given some of the poison a rest for years but continued his love of the drink. It was an affection we shared. He’d come to terms with some moderation in recent years and had his rules. He never touched a drink on Friday nights and didn’t enjoy his first taste of the weekend until the last shoppers had drifted away from the market on a Saturday.

  We’d meet up on those afternoons behind the doughnut stand. I’d be carrying some cold beers and a bottle of wine from the bottle-shop across from the market. He’d have the guitar slung across his shoulder and would be licking his lips, anxious for a drop. We’d make our way up to the park and sit under one of them big Moreton Bays that some smart fella had planted a hundred years back to keep the sun off. Curtis loved to talk but conversation with him was sometimes hard to follow. The stories he told roamed back and forward over time. Or he’d pluck a moment from the sky and mash it up with some nightmare he’d had months back when he was in the DTs after a big drink.

  ‘You heard of the Black Elvis, Sammy?’ he asked me one time.

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Blackfella from up north who can sing and play like fire. But better than that he came out of a rock in the ground. He was a lizard. And now he’s a human. He was a rock before.’

  ‘A rock?’

  ‘Other times the sea.’

  ‘He comes from the sea?’

  ‘No. He was the sea.’

 
I didn’t believe most of what Curtis said until I got charged up myself and it all made sense.

  I’d tried hard to give up on drink myself. I got a scare one time after this young doctor – said she was from Hong Kong or somewhere – put a picture of my insides against a wall, turned on a light, pointed to my liver and said it was the worst she’d seen in ten years in the business. She stuck another picture on the wall alongside mine.

  ‘See here, Mr Holt?’ she said, pointing. ‘This is what a healthy liver looks like.’

  It looked fat and well fed. ‘You’re right there, Doc. That’s a very healthy liver.’ I knew then that I was well and truly fucked.

  Poring over the picture of my insides, she screwed up her nose like one of us had farted. ‘Now, take a good look at your own liver, Mr Holt. What do you see?’

  It looked like a dried-up and burnt old lamb chop that had been left for dead.

  ‘I’m not sure, Doc. I don’t have your experience, you see?’

  She sat me down and told me straight that if I didn’t get off the drink I’d likely be dead in six months, cranking the story with a mess of scare tactics to frighten me off. I forgave her good intentions. After all, she was a doctor.

  ‘Do you understand that I am trying to help you, Mr Holt?’ she asked, ramming the point home.

  To be truthful I was finding it hard to concentrate on what she was saying. I just kept thinking about this mechanic bloke who checked out a secondhand car I’d been thinking about buying many years back. The car was a red Laser, as I remember, and he reckoned I should pass on it because the clutch was about to go.

  ‘You won’t get to the next corner on it,’ he warned me. ‘A clutch’ll cost you more than what you’ll pay for the car in the first place.’

  I chose to ignore both his expertise and his doomsaying. I bought the car anyway and drove it around for the next six years without it missing a beat, until I rammed it into a factory wall taking a bend too fast in the rain. I wrote the car off and ended up with a broken arm and some stitches in my head. It was the last time I got behind a wheel.

  ‘Mr Holt, do you realise the seriousness of what I am telling you?’

  ‘Oh, I do, doctor. I do. Trust me. You’ve just convinced me I’ve had my last drink.’

  She smiled at me, not because she believed a word I said, but because she was certain I was bullshitting.

  I met up with Curtis the next day and sat with him under the tree sharing a bottle. I’d already decided it would be best not to spoil a nice afternoon with a tale of woe from the doctor. And I didn’t want to interrupt the story he was telling about the night his second wife ran off on him and he got down on his knees in the kitchen and prayed to his long dead mother to help him get the love of his life back.

  ‘I had my eyes closed, and I heard this roaring wind, and she came down the chimney over the wood stove, there in the kitchen. She slapped me hard across the face and told me I didn’t deserve a woman, good or evil. My own mother used those very words.’

  He took a swig from the bottle, wiped it on his sleeve and passed it to me. I held it in my hand and thought long and hard about a drink without taking one.

  ‘How long had she been dead by then?’

  ‘A good twenty years. Maybe thirty.’

  ‘How’d she look after being dead all that time?’

  ‘Just as I expected. Like an angel.’

  Curtis and me drank away the afternoon and into the night, trying our best to out-bullshit each other, until he passed out against the tree. I sat staring up at the big black sky until I fell asleep too. I don’t remember getting to my feet, or taking off for anywhere, but when I woke the next morning, I saw a hot sun lifting in the sky. I was lying in a paddock in the middle of nowhere. My shoes and socks and shirt were missing and I had bruises and cuts on my arms and feet. I didn’t know where I was, how I’d got there, and my pockets were empty as a ghost’s coffin. I’d also taken a decent belting. I got to my feet and stumbled across the paddock, trying to stay out of the way of the thistles and thorns.

  I came across a road and started walking. It wasn’t long before a copper came along. He pulled onto a rise on the side of the bitumen. I was in trouble but was worn out and ready for him to put me away. But he never. He drove me to the local lock-up, dug out a flannelette shirt and some shoes and socks from the lost property box, wrote me a rail pass, even gave me a twenty-dollar note from his own wallet and dropped me at the railway station.

  ‘Your train should be here in around forty minutes. It will get you back into the city.’

  I thanked him. And I meant it.

  ‘How’d you end up out here—’ he laughed, ‘—without a car?’

  I looked up at the sky and scratched my head. ‘Beats me.’

  On the train into town, watching the country disappear behind me, I got the shakes real bad. Right then I would have killed for a drink. The train slowed and stopped. Out the window was a forest of empty wooden buildings parked on the side of a hill. There must have been a hundred or more of them – they had made their own little town, without noise or people to bother them. When the train whistle blew and we took off I wished I lived in that town all on my own.

  That night I had a nightmare: I was lying in that paddock again in the middle of nowhere, and the sky was full of thunder and scratches of white-hot lightning. I could hear yabbering above the racket. It was two fellas looking down at me and chuckling. One of them was chewing on something. It was my old liver. I looked down at my belly and saw that my guts had been ripped open.

  The nightmare had rattled me and I stayed away from Curtis for a few weeks while I tried drying out. I didn’t miss the grog as much as I did his good company. When I’d been on the wagon for record time and felt it was safe to venture out, I tracked him down to his usual spot on the front steps of the old ballroom. Walking down the street to the market, dodging the crowd with their shopping jeeps and baskets and howling kids in prams, I could hear him, wailing out a Hank Williams number, way before I saw him. The guitar playing was as good as ever and the voice surprised me, better than I’d heard it in years.

  Between songs Curtis worked the crowd with some of his stories. When he spotted me he waved and served them an old joke of his, for my benefit, I reckon. ‘Hey folks, how do you know when you’ve knocked off a blackfella’s jukebox? All the songs are by Charley Pride!’

  Later in the afternoon, back under the tree I was sure I’d been kidnapped from, I told him where I’d ended up that other morning and how it had frightened me so much I hadn’t had a drink since. I reckoned he wouldn’t have a clue about what had happened to me but I asked anyway. ‘Do you remember anything about that night, Curtis?’

  ‘Would have been flat-out asleep. Nothing shakes me once I nod off. You could hit me over the head with a house brick. Matter of fact, Sammy, I have been hit over the head with a brick in this park. All I know is, when I come to the next morning, you were nowhere to be seen. Back to your crib, I thought.’

  ‘Well, I weren’t. I woke up the other side of shit creek.’

  ‘Maybe you were taken in a spaceship. By them alien fellas.’

  ‘Aliens?’

  ‘Yep. Doris, who I drink with now and then – down by the tram shelter there opposite the hospital – she told me about this time that she was taken by the aliens. They drilled this hole in her neck and put something in there. Some plug or wires.’

  ‘In her neck?’

  He offered me the bottle. I pushed it away.

  ‘In her neck. They did her no harm … Old Doris,’ he whispered then. ‘Couldn’t that girl go in the old days. Sweeter than sugar.’

  We sat quiet and thought about Doris for a while, until he tapped me on the knee and looked me hard in the eye.

  ‘So that’s it for you? No more drink?’

  ‘No more for me, Curtis. I’m staying
off it until I can find out how I ended up in that paddock.’

  He lifted the bottle up and toasted me.

  ‘Well, here’s to your health, Sammy boy. And all the more for me.’

  He laughed, drained the bottle, and pointed the neck at me.

  ‘You know the very same thing happened to Hank. More than once.’

  ‘What are you on about, Curtis? You got a fresh story on Hank every week.’

  ‘That’s because he comes to me, Sammy. He comes whispering to me in the night sometimes. He’d been playing down south there, in Louisiana, happy as Larry one minute, strumming and yodelling away, a girl lining him up for the night. Hank had been thinking that he’d never felt better in his life. And then, bang, he’d find himself across the border in Tennessee or somewhere a day or two later, in a cheap hotel room, or down an alley, or even backstage at another show, warming to go on stage, with not a clue how he got there.’

  ‘That was caused by the grog?’

  ‘A bit of that. But mostly other stuff. Miss Emma they call it over there.’

  ‘Miss Emma? Some crazy woman get hold of him?’

  ‘No woman. Morphine. Old Hank took it for pain mostly. And a bit of a drift, you’d have to think. It kept him going when he had a show on. But done him in, too. Killed him. The crooked doctors he was seeing made a blue and shot him up with old Emma three times in one day – double, triple-dosed him. He could feel himself dying in the backseat of a car he was riding in. They say he lifted himself right out of his own body before he could be snatched off to hell. He told the devil himself, loud, “You’re not pissing on my soul,” his exact words.’

  ‘Where’d you hear that?’

  ‘From Hank. He come and told me one night when I was sitting right here.’ Curtis shrugged like it was nothing to meet up with the ghost of Hank Williams. He looked across the park at an empty tram drumming by.

  ‘He’s still out there some place. That’s what happens when you leave your body premature. You is a lost soul.’ He nudged me with the bottle one last time. ‘You sure you won’t share a drink with me?’