Matthew Flinders' Cat

by Bryce Courtenay

  However, it seemed the policeman wasn’t quite through with him. ‘Hey, Billy, them handcuffs, where’d you get ’em?’

  Billy stopped but didn’t turn around.

  ‘Handcuffs! Where’d you get ’em?’ Sergeant Orr repeated, this time in a slightly sterner voice.

  Billy was forced to turn around. ‘They’re American, Confederate Army issue, 1875.’

  ‘Yeah? Lemme take a look.’

  Billy now had to wait while Orr approached. ‘I have every right to own them,’ he said defensively.

  ‘Not so sure about that, Billy. Can’t have every Tom, Dick and Harry walking around with a pair of handcuffs now, can we?’ The police sergeant winked at Billy, ‘Unless of course you’re into S & M?’

  Orr was playing the Billy card for all it was worth. ‘They’re to keep my things safe, officer.’ Billy pointed to the open handcuff that hung from the handle of his briefcase. ‘I usually wear that one around my left wrist.’

  The policeman raised one eyebrow, ‘Come now, Billy, you know better than that? Only police officers are allowed to own handcuffs and only crims are authorised to wear them. That is, them and prison officers, not even the private security blokes. No one else, it’s against the law.’ Billy could see that Orr was beginning to enjoy himself. That he’d decided not to let him go on his way.

  Billy knew that no such law existed. ‘They’re not standard issue, sergeant, not regulation, they qualify as genuine antiques, a collector’s item.’

  ‘Oh, is that so? Antiques, is it? Valuable then, eh?’ The policeman reached down and examined the handcuffs, which were plainly quite different in their configuration from the ones he carried on his belt. ‘What’s so important that it needs to be handcuffed around your wrist?’ He looked at Billy sternly, ‘Maybe I’d better take a look, eh?’

  Billy drew back, unable to conceal his anxiety from the policeman. There was nothing in the briefcase that could be thought of as contraband or even valuable, except perhaps the handcuffs themselves, but his briefcase contained all that remained of his private life. The thought of Orr’s big paws rummaging through his personal possessions was more than Billy could bear. He could demand that Orr produce a search warrant, but he knew how provocative that would seem. The cop had been mocking him all along, but he’d nevertheless been pleasant enough. He accepted that policemen hate defence lawyers, particularly the ones who regularly got their clients acquitted. ‘Please, sergeant, it’s just, you know, my personal things, bits ’n’ pieces.’ He recalled what the boy had said earlier about his briefcase. Attempting a grin, he added, ‘I’m afraid I’m a bit of a bag lady.’

  ‘Nothing stolen, eh? Drugs? Block of hash? Some pot?’ Billy knew Orr was having him on, playing a game when he knew Billy couldn’t come back with a clever rebuttal. This wasn’t the courtroom, where a suitably acerbic comment could put an officer of the law in his place. Again he wondered what he might have said when Orr had been in the witness box.

  ‘No, sir, please, sir, you know me. I’m a derelict, there’s nothing else!’ Billy knew precisely the tone of voice the police sergeant required of him, though he hated himself for his sycophancy.

  The big policeman looked at Billy and grinned, he had achieved his purpose. By thoroughly humiliating Billy, he could now afford to be magnanimous. He glanced at his watch, possibly remembering that he had a train to catch, then looked back at Billy, ‘Righto, on yer bicycle, son, ’ave a nice day.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, officer,’ Billy said softly, accepting this final insult. He turned quickly to where he intended to cross at Shakespeare Place, but the sudden movement caused his bad knee to give and he toppled to the pavement.

  The policeman stepped toward him, grabbed him by the back of his shirt collar and hefted him onto his feet. ‘You orright?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, thank you, it’s...it’s my leg,’ Billy stammered, shaken by the fall. ‘I ...I...woke up this morning with a gammy leg. Bad knee, you see.’ He could sense how pathetic he sounded.

  The policeman nodded in the direction of Sydney Hospital, the next building on from Parliament House, ‘Have the hospital take a look, tell them I sent you. Sergeant Phillip Orr, they know me there.’

  Billy smiled weakly, ‘Yes, thank you, sergeant, I’ll tell them.’ By supplying his name, it was obvious Orr thought Billy would not have recalled their previous encounter.

  The policeman looked to see what traffic was approaching up Macquarie Street and then raced across the road, dodging between an oncoming white laundry van and a taxi approaching from the opposite side of the road. Billy watched as Orr turned down Bent Street, half running. He waited until the light changed to green and crossed Shakespeare Place, keeping to the Gardens side of Macquarie Street. For some strange reason, probably the adrenaline pumping into his system as a result of the fall, his knee felt considerably better.

  It occurred to Billy, who, like most drunks, was somewhat paranoid, that Orr might have so enjoyed the banter that it would become a regular morning occurrence. In his experience bullies were like that, returning day after day to repeat their intimidation and to enjoy the fear and humiliation it brought about in their victims. Orr was the archetypal beer-gut sergeant whose time had passed and, as further promotion was unlikely, he possessed a highly developed sense of injustice against his calling. Billy was simply someone to humiliate, a way of venting his frustration.

  Billy had experienced the same thing with several older cops, who were apt to show more interest in him than any of the other drunks in the area. They would bail him up on a fairly regular basis, curious to see if the grog had destroyed his once famous legal brain.

  The standard routine employed by the homeless drunk was to shout and hurl abuse when a police officer pulled him up. Most younger officers simply couldn’t be bothered going through the routine of an arrest and the subsequent paperwork involved and so moved on. But creating a fuss when cornered wasn’t something Billy knew how to do. Moreover, he’d long since given up trying to behave like a gentleman, which policemen such as Orr simply saw as an attempt to appear superior and took great pleasure in disabusing him of this notion. Now, when confronted, Billy made a point of showing how his brain had become addled by alcohol and that he was a pathetic, harmless creature. Criminal lawyers are, after all, good actors and playing the role of a gormless drunk wasn’t difficult. It was what a certain class of older police officer required, the satisfaction of confirming how far the mighty have fallen. For the most part the police would ask a few questions, cluck their tongues, shake their heads and move on. It was unusual for such a confrontation to go as long as it had with Orr, and Billy was annoyed that he hadn’t adopted his role of brain-dead drunk immediately.

  Billy again tried to recall whether he had given Sergeant Orr a hard time when he’d had him in the witness box, but nothing came readily to mind. Policemen have long memories and it doesn’t take much for them to feel slighted by defence counsel. There was an old saying among the constabulary: If the Law is an ass, then the lawyers do the braying and the police do the donkey work. Most older police officers who appeared for the prosecution deeply resented seeing months of painstakingly gathered evidence swept away by what they regarded as smooth-talking, pettifogging criminal lawyers.

  Billy contemplated finding another place to sleep. He’d been sprung twice there in one morning. First by the kid, who on the face of it seemed harmless enough, then by the big cop. Was this a warning? You never could tell with street kids. What if the boy belonged to a gang? They’d come back on pension day to rob him.

  Billy loved this part of the city, it was where he had practised as a barrister. The Botanic Gardens had been his private joy since he’d been a junior in a law firm when, each lunch break, he would take his cheese and pickle sandwiches and a bottle of milk to sit on a particular bench beside a small pond. The thought of moving from his summer residence, located as it was in
this, the most beautiful part of the inner city, filled him with a terrible anxiety. The bench under the ficus tree beside the library wall and within spitting distance of the Gardens was now as much a home to him as the Eastern Suburbs mansion he’d once occupied.

  He knew that he was taking a risk by staying; street kids depended on pension and dole days almost as much as the recipients themselves, and there could scarcely have been a drunk in the Woolloomooloo, Kings Cross, Darlinghurst or Surry Hills area who hadn’t been robbed by a bunch of feral kids. The dispossessed children roving the area lived without the luxury of conscience, they were ruthless and unfeeling and, like all predators, they looked for the already wounded, the easy victims. In a perverse sort of way, the feral kids were a part of the street culture, many already dependent on hard drugs, and while they were to be greatly feared, they were part of the environment in which the alcoholic learns to survive. There were worse around.

  Like most homeless people, Billy feared the thrillseekers the most. They were the young hoons who came from a background of so-called respectable parents with homes in the outer suburbs. While the street kids robbed you, they usually left you unharmed. If you resisted, they’d give you a bit of a kicking, then leave you to sleep it off. It wasn’t nice, but then it wasn’t life-threatening. The feral kids weren’t silly enough to kill their major source of income. The rampaging youths who came into the inner city mostly on the weekends were quite a different matter. They liked to kick and maim, and if they found a drunk unconscious in an alley, they would soak him with the remains of the metho he’d been drinking and set him alight. They were more interested in persecution and gratuitous violence than the few dollars they might take from a drunk.

  Now, on his own again, Billy began to feel somewhat calmer. The boy had seemed uninterested in his briefcase, dismissing it as commonplace, he also seemed quite intelligent so Billy argued with himself that there was a good chance he’d leave him alone. In the case of Sergeant Phillip Orr, had it not been for Billy’s sore knee, his need to urinate and his conversation with the boy, he would have been well gone before the policeman came off duty at six.

  Billy sat himself down in a bus shelter and locked the handcuff back around his left wrist. Only when the briefcase was shackled to his person did he ever feel truly secure. His greatest fears were that the briefcase would be taken from him in a bashing or he’d forget where he’d left it during a drinking bout.

  The scuffed briefcase carried an odd assortment of bits and pieces, each of which represented some small, sane purpose in his life, a reminder that he was still in contact with some aspects of reality. Some of it was essentially practical, such as a bottle-opener and corkscrew combination, a tin-opener, his spectacles, a pair of nail clippers, his knife, fork and spoon, a box of matches, as well as several short pieces of string and three corks of various sizes, to be used when he lost the top to a bottle of scotch or, for that matter, a bottle of anything else he might be drinking if he couldn’t afford his favourite tipple.

  More unexpected was a bundle of press-clippings, all of them of single-column width and the longest no more than twenty centimetres. Some appeared yellowed with age while others were of more recent origin, all held together by a large black bulldog clip. Also in the briefcase was a plastic raincoat, a packet of rat-poison pellets and a box of disposable surgical gloves and, next to this, a battered barrister’s wig.

  In a tiny leather pouch, greasy from being handled, were three small polished pebbles, one of them rose granite, the second a tiger’s eye and the last a clear green chrysoprase. Each pebble was approximately the size of a ten-cent piece and had a distinct function, depending on the calibre of the hangover Billy might possess on any given morning. He would often wake up with his mouth so dry that his tongue was stuck to its roof. If his hangover came from the luxury of drinking scotch the previous night, he would pop the tiger’s eye into his mouth and suck on it until he had produced sufficient saliva to allow him to clear his throat without gagging. If his tipple had been moselle or port, known as monkey’s blood, he’d choose the green chrysoprase, or if rum or brandy, the rose granite. While he couldn’t remember how he’d first acquired the habit of sucking the appropriate stone, he was convinced that the stones had magical properties, so using the wrong stone would mean his headache would last all day.

  The next item in the briefcase was a photo album, about twenty-three centimetres high and twelve centimetres wide. It held two dozen clear cellophane envelopes though not all of them contained a photograph. To the casual observer, there seemed to be the usual random selection of family pictures. The first page started with a black-and-white snap of a very attractive, slender young woman in a bridal gown, though closer examination of the album revealed that the following seven pages showed the same woman, each print taken a few years apart, moving from the early black and white snaps to colour photos. In each photo, the woman had become increasingly plump until, on the final page, she was hardly recognisable, a huge, obese woman in a shapeless blue cotton tent. Her hair was untidy and she squinted at the camera, her expression decidedly grumpy, as if she greatly resented the intrusion of the lens.

  The next set of seven pictures appeared to be the usual melange of childhood snaps, all in colour, starting with a baby in a richly decorated and enamelled Victorian cot. The photos also seemed to progress in periods of about three years, the second photograph showing a little girl standing behind a doll’s pram. She was wearing white socks, nearly up to her knees, and a pink organza dress with a matching ribbon in her hair. In the next photo the girl seemed to be about six years old and in her first school uniform, her Panama hat throwing a dark shadow over the top half of her pretty face. Then there was the same girl, around nine or ten, wearing riding breeches, jacket and cap, seated on the back of a palomino pony. Next followed an image of her as a nicely tanned teenager in a white bikini, holding a cone containing an extravagant whirl of green icecream, which she observed with a cross-eyed and comical expression, her pink tongue about to wind itself about the icy swirl. After this there seemed to be a somewhat larger division in time, perhaps five or six years. The next picture was a close-up of a very pretty young woman in her early twenties wearing a cap and gown. It was obviously taken at a graduation ceremony as two out-of-focus images of students, also in cap and gown, were in the background, against the cloisters in the main quad of Sydney University. The final photograph, closer in time to the graduation shot, showed the girl wearing the same wedding gown as the woman on the first page of the album. Both her pose and her physical resemblance to the original woman were uncanny, as if the film in the camera had somehow been wound back to the first exposure thirty or so years earlier.

  The two women in the album were obviously mother and daughter, and if they were also Billy’s wife and child then it had to be said the girl had inherited none of her looks from her father. The O’Shannessy lineage had clearly been subjected to a severe case of gene swamp by his wife’s side of the family.

  After the daughter’s wedding picture, the next seven pages in the album were vacant, although more careful scrutiny of the cellophane envelopes would have shown that they’d been disturbed and several of them had minute tears at the top corners where a photograph had been removed. It was curious that not a single picture of Billy existed.

  If the person viewing the album had continued turning the seven blank leaves until they reached the eighth page, they would have come across one final photograph showing a large tabby cat sitting on the polished, grey-granite apron of a gravesite.

  The cat was seated on its haunches, obscuring most of the inscription on the headstone behind it, although above its head the name ‘Charlie’ was carved and etched in white into the grey granite. It was as if the cat was posing rather grandly under its own name, but the camera shutter had captured the cat in the process of licking its chops, its pink tongue obscuring its nose.

  The last items to be found
in the briefcase were a dozen spiral-bound reporter’s notepads of the kind you can purchase at any newsagency as well as two biros, one blue, the other red. They, more than anything, served to keep Billy anchored to the world outside his life on the street. Billy had become an inveterate correspondent to the letters column of the Sydney Morning Herald, where under the pseudonym ‘Billy Goat’ he had become a regular and popular contributor.

  Billy told himself that alcoholism and writing enjoyed a long history together. While he had never had anything outside of an occasional legal opinion published in the Law Society Journal, he nevertheless cherished the thought of becoming an essayist. He was convinced that, given his interest in the botanical differences that made Australia’s flora unique in the world, he had a subject waiting to be exploited. The average person knew nothing about Australia’s ecosystem and it led to the land being constantly raped. Eighty-five per cent of the world’s plant species were indigenous to Australia and most of its citizens couldn’t tell a dahlia from a chrysanthemum, let alone identify any of the native species. We had conned ourselves into believing that the European floral impostors that filled our parks and suburban gardens in spring and summer gave us our sense of truth, yet these intruders had turned our seasons upside-down and were preferred to the glory of our winter-flowering indigenous plants. Even the neatly clipped lawns we so cherished were constructed from imported grasses that had no right in gobbling up the precious water resources of the driest land on earth.

  Billy’s big problem was getting the essays he wrote in his head onto paper. His obsessive personality allowed him to write the essays in his imagination with a white-hot intensity, so that they were all-persuasive, wondrously original and solidly wrought in argument. But when it came to writing the essays in the notepads, his information appeared insubstantial and contrived or, worse still, the ravings of an ecology nut.