by Mike Safe
A column appeared in Harcourt’s old newspaper, sniping at his family’s part in what it claimed was becoming the ‘Mike Vargas death cult industry.’ There was Kirsten’s worldwide TV interview with Poppy, Harcourt’s cover story in ‘high end gossip rag’ Vanity Fair, and the ‘secret tell-all memoir’ he was writing for Tess’s publishers with ‘Vargas’s ex-muscle for hire’ Dexter Dutton. The column concluded, ‘It seems the Harcourts – husband, wife and daughter – have turned Vargas’s tragic passing into a nice little – no, make that big – earner for the family. All it needs now is for musician son Jack to write a poignant power ballad in memory of Mike. How could it not be number one within days?’
The column was written by Tab Markinson. Well, that was Tab just being Tab, thought Harcourt. So fuck him.
Burk rang. ‘Tab somehow thinks those who have been given the arse from here should still have loyalty. According to his warped thinking you should have given full chapter and verse of Vargas’s last days to us, a daily newspaper that’s slowly flushing itself down the toilet, not to some highfaluting New York magazine that sells around the world.’
‘Sorry, it doesn’t work like that,’ said Harcourt. ‘Poor Toxic Tab, hopefully he’ll get flushed soon enough.’
Burk managed a laugh. ‘That may well happen – the word now is the big boys will be eating their own at the next round of redundancies. They’ve realised they still need a few working stiffs to go out and actually find real stories, not pseuds like Tab gibbering away.’ He paused for a moment. ‘And speaking of flushing … Phil Woodrell, that old footballer I tracked down for you. He’s in hospital, totally smashed up, brain damage. Crashed his car last night. The word is his blood alcohol reading was three times the limit. Don’t worry, I won’t be writing anything about him. He’s said to be at death’s door, poor fella.’
‘That’s too bad. He was a bitter guy, but deep down not such a bad bloke.’ After the call Harcourt couldn’t help but think about Vargas and the Woodrell brothers. Even though Dutton was agreeable to having it in his book, would bringing up those long ago memories mean anything to anyone now? Anyone other than Ralph Jones, who had raised it with him originally?
He sat at his desk looking out the window at a sunny backyard and a brilliantly blue sky brushed clean by a fresh offshore wind. There was a nice little swell running down the road and the tide was about right. But he had a deadline to meet. What Toxic Ted, cynical arsehole that he was, had written contained a grain of truth.
He would finish the book with Dutton, working Tommy Woodrell’s drowning somehow into the narrative, although it wasn’t connected directly to Dutton. Then he’d even endure the circus of promoting it to the masses and, of course, counting what it all might add to his bank count. But after that?
He liked Dutton a lot, a guy who had stood by Vargas through thick and thin, and he liked Poppy even more, a woman in charge who had kept her composure, her dignity even, through the madness that had revolved around her new husband’s death, only to have it continuing in the still-clamorous aftermath. Every man of a certain age that he knew now secretly, or not so secretly, had a teenage-like crush on her. Well, hell yeah, including him if he was honest about it, even though he was old enough, maybe wise enough, to know that was all it would ever be and all he wanted it to be.
Tess had hinted there might be a book to do with Poppy after the Dutton project was done.
‘Why not Kirsten?’ he’d suggested. ‘They’ve hit it off in such a big way and seem to talk on the phone for hours. And, anyway, too much profile doesn’t appear to be enough as far as she’s concerned.’
‘Maybe,’ Tess had said. ‘But she’s got enough to do and is already running at warp speed with the TV show and the magazine… But we’ll see.’
And that was the end of that conversation. Tess seemed to have gotten the hint.
Later that day Harcourt had a congratulatory telephone call from Gordy Stone, who had relocated to Singapore. ‘Front cover of Vanity fucking Fair! I can’t believe it. I knew you were mixed up in this Vargas thing, but now this. I saw it on the newsstand today. What a nice little earner. And a few months back you were wondering where your next pay cheque was coming from.’
‘Gordy, it wasn’t that bad.’ He didn’t like the way Gordy had used the term ‘nice little earner’. It reminded too much of Toxic Tab’s jibe.
‘Well, ride it for all it’s worth, Johno. Get it while you can. That’s all I can say.’
Harcourt was silent for a moment. ‘I’m doing my best, mate. But we’ll see … Anyhow, how’s it going up there?’ he asked, keen to change the subject.
Gordy went into a sort of elated overdrive. ‘It’s the good life up here. My work’s appreciated, they’re actually interested in what I’ve got to say. Mix of locals and expats, bit of a United Nations at times but without the speeches and boring bits.’
‘Sounds good.’
‘Yeah, this lady and I have spent a couple of very pleasant afternoons knocking back our share of gin slings in the Long Bar at Raffles. Haven’t seen Somerset Maugham yet, although there seems to be a fair share of fossilised Brit colonial types doddering about the place. Rudyard Kipling used to knock about Raffles as well – you know, he wrote The Jungle Book and The White Man’s Burden, that imperialistic poem way back whenever.’
‘Well, go easy up there –and stay out of trouble. Don’t turn yourself into the Singaporean man’s burden.’
After the phone calls, Harcourt didn’t have it in him to return to his keyboard. Instead, he walked up the hill to visit Ralph Jones.
While Dot, Ralph’s ever-cheerful wife, brewed them coffee, Harcourt told him about Phil Woodrell, the car smash, his critical condition.
‘Well, that’s sad,’ Ralph said. ‘He was a man beaten down by life, much of it his own doing, I don’t deny that.’
Of course, Ralph knew of Vargas’s death – how could he not?
‘You ended up in the middle of it all, didn’t you?’ he frowned.
‘Well, it’s something at least that Mike acknowledged young Tommy, that he remembered him. I’ll give him that.’
He told Ralph about the memoir he was doing with Dutton and that they’d agreed the story of Tommy’s drowning and Vargas’s memories of it would be included. ‘To be crass and play the PR agent for a moment, it’s kind of uncanny that they both came to die the same way but all those years apart.’
Ralph took a long draw on his coffee. ‘You know, the older you get the more you value small mercies, little insights and understandings that the world has a habit of delivering to you. I’m thankful that Mike, for all he had, all that fame and fortune, thought of Tommy, at least for a moment here or there. It’s right that Tommy’s story and Mike’s part in it be given some light, finally find its place, and then the whole damn matter can be put to rest.’
The next morning Harcourt still couldn’t face the keyboard and so joined Carpark and Brown for coffee and bacon-and-egg rolls, something they hadn’t managed to do very often since his return from LA.
Carpark was soon telling them how he was finally flush with cash as the profits from his drawn-out land deal with his investors were starting to come through. ‘And there’s more in the works.’
They decided to meet for a surf later and Harcourt made his leisurely way to the Sand Bar where Jack and Randy Wayne were working through a bunch of songs. The shows that Jack had done at the bar had been a success, two nights becoming five. Jack and Randy Wayne had since teamed up as a duo, playing a mix of acoustic country rock and folk plus some blues, more or less Americana, with a few Solar Sons favourites, that had gone down well on a short tour they’d organised up and down the coast. The Solar Sons had officially folded, the bass player and drummer opting to stay in England.
Sissy Broughton had heard Jack and Randy Wayne playing, had seen immediate potential and offered to manage them. One of her first tricks was to set them up with a trip to Austin in Texas, the city that liked to show itself o
ff as the live music capital of the world, where they would record an album.
‘If we can get it right, it opens up the whole American festival circuit for us,’ Jack told his father. ‘I could go back to uni, but he’s fun to play with, the old cowboy. He makes it easy.’
‘Like that Dire Straits’ song,’ Harcourt had offered. ‘Their first hit “Sultans of Swing” … “Check out Guitar George, he knows all the chords…”’
‘Ah, yeah, I kinda remember that one, a bit before my time.’
At the Sand Bar, he found Randy Wayne restringing one of his guitars, a Gretsch resonator, which he used when playing with a slide. ‘We’re going to work up a couple of real old blues tunes,’ he told Harcourt. ‘Need to dirty up the sound a bit. Don’t want us seen as a pair of jolly folkie types, if you know what I mean.’
Jack emerged from the back room, phone in hand. ‘Just had a call from Sissy. She’s heard from the cops in London that they’ve arrested someone and are going to charge him with Elmore’s murder.’
‘Hey, that’s good news, if good is the right description when you’re talking about murder,’ said Randy Wayne.
Apparently, an ice-addled acquaintance of the similarly addled thug who had attacked and robbed Elmore Bruce had stolen one of the credit cards taken from Elmore and stupidly used it in an attempt to buy himself a pair of high-end sneakers in a trendy Covent Garden store. He’d ended up being arrested and a bit of basic police work linked him straight away to the killer who had duly confessed – an investigation that had gone nowhere over several months produced a result within a matter of hours.
‘It at least lifts some of the weight,’ said Jack. ‘He was an all right guy. We had some good times …’
‘C’mon,’ said Randy Wayne, ‘let’s play some music, kid.’
‘There’s a name for you two,’ said Harcourt, also trying to lighten the mood, ‘the Kid and the Grandpa.’
Harcourt, borrowing Randy Wayne’s monster-sized Gibson Hummingbird – ‘jeez, you need a special machinery operator’s licence to play this thing’ – sat in with them for a while as they figured out their couple of blues songs.
‘Now that’s what I call dirty blues,’ said Randy Wayne after a chaotic couple of run throughs. ‘If anything, a bit too dirty,’ he added. ‘But if we all manage to play the same chords, different positions or whatever, at more or less the same time it helps.’
Harcourt left them to it and, walking home, he found himself in an agreeable state of mind. As he came in the front door, his mobile phone rang. He didn’t recognise the number.
‘Hello, John Harcourt?’
‘Eh, yeah.’ For a second, Harcourt didn’t like the sound of this. He might have stopped answering his mobile since the Vargas fixation had inundated him with calls, but his happy disposition had caught him momentarily off guard.
‘This is Rex Bruce, Elmore’s father.’
‘Oh, hi, Rex. I hear there’s been an arrest at last.’
They talked about it, Bruce saying that the arrested man was about to be charged, most likely with murder.
‘I remembered that early morning, how you called me when we heard of Elmore’s death. Your words of condolence. I appreciated that. It was kind of you to do so. I thought I should get around to thanking you properly.’ Finally, the conversation returned to their sons and music. ‘Listen,’ Harcourt said, talking as fast as he was thinking, ‘we have this crazy old guys’ pick-up band going, but now our guitarist and Jack are setting off on this whole new thing …’
He knew Bruce had once been a professional guitarist – a blues stylist on both electric and acoustic – and he wondered if he’d like to sit in with him, Carpark and whoever else they could round up. ‘I mean, we play everything from Hank Williams to Mississippi John Hurt to Dick Dale surf guitar to three chord originals.’
Bruce laughed. ‘Oh, that sounds kinda fun. I haven’t played before an audience for a few years now … But yeah, why not?’
‘Well, our sons played together and had a good thing going for a time, right?’
‘Yeah, right.’
They agreed to keep in touch and Harcourt said he’d get back after moving his book project along a bit. Bruce suggested he’d likewise want time to see the arrested man formally charged and tried.
Afterwards, as Harcourt, thought more about it, he wondered if he’d been presumptuous, getting ahead of himself with the band invitation. But what the heck. His good mood remained intact. He even managed an hour of solid work on the Dutton book.
After that, he pulled on his full length winter wetsuit and grabbed his new board – a version of the Donald Takayama DT 1 speed shape he’d had custom built. It was the same model he’d ridden the day Vargas had died on the Lailai Atoll reef. He met Carpark and Brown on the beach where small but perfect waves peeled across the sandbars under gentle winter sunshine. Carpark had brought along Titanic, the board that had run down the British backpacker during summer. Brown had a prototype performance longboard, sleek and fast, that he now had contracts to custom build in limited numbers and ship to Japan,
The paddle out was easy, with only a scattering of others about. They caught a few and spent the wait between sets talking about nothing in particular. Carpark and Brown paddled into a couple of small ones, leaving Harcourt alone with the afternoon sun glinting off the glassy water, not a cloud in the sky, just the cry of a gull as it flew overhead on its way to wherever. He looked to shore and up the hill to where no doubt Ralph Jones, the old lifeguard and one time king of the coast, looked down on them, maybe with a glass of something in his hand to salute the passing of another perfect day.
A wave came and Harcourt caught it, quickly to his feet, turning left and trimming the DT 1 so that it flew down the smoothest of lines. About as much fun as you could have standing up. As he raced by a smiling Carpark, who was paddling back out, his friend yelled, ‘Hey, Johno, not looking too bad for an almost old bloke!’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank my editor, Catherine McCredie, for showing me in the nicest possible way that less can mean more and that an author’s every wordy indulgence doesn’t have to end up on the printed page. Also, three fine ladies at Ventura Press: Eleanor Reader and Zoe Hale, who saw me through the process and their boss, Jane Curry, for giving an old newspaper hack a go. Thanks also to my long-time Weekend Australian Magazine colleague, Marcelo Baez, for his killer cover illustration. Finally, huge gratitude to my wife and best buddy, Jenni Gilbert, a brilliant writer and editor, who never once said, ‘When are you going to finish writing that bloody thing?’ but probably should have.