Matthew Flinders' Cat

by Bryce Courtenay

  He was dog-tired. It had been a long and emotional day and not without the usual craving. It was close to midnight when Con had dropped him off and he reasoned it didn’t make much sense to drag himself all the way back to the Cross to take up his vigil. Alf Petersen had turned up just on midnight and there had been no other visitor when he’d packed it in about two a.m. Petersen had left at about one, accompanied by a woman, but this time the light hadn’t come on over the door when they’d emerged. Although he could make out the bulk of the ex-politician, the woman had been partially protected by Petersen’s size. He could only tell that the other person was female by the tap-tap of her high-heeled shoes. The other visitors he’d seen arrive earlier in the evening had all left after an hour or so. Billy concluded that the woman must be The Queenie, which immediately raised an interesting question in his mind.

  Now, as he lay on the bench wrapped in his blanket, he thought of the interview with Barker, the detective sergeant at Kings Cross Police Station. Over the years he’d met dozens, no probably hundreds, of his kind. Some lawyers referred to them as the salt of the earth, men who knew the limitations of the law and were good practical cops. Working on the principle that what the eye doesn’t see the law needn’t grieve over, they got the job done. They kept their districts reasonably quiet and they knew where to find the troublemakers when the shit hit the fan. There was even a name for it in law circles, they were referred to as ‘Bumper Farrell Cops’, meaning that men such as the notorious Bumper Farrell saved the courts a lot of trouble by accidentally falling on the so-called perpetrators of crime. Farrell’s two hundred and ten pound frame had proved amazingly effective in breaking bones and teaching crims to behave themselves.

  The only trouble with old-timers like Barker was that they eventually grew cynical and disillusioned with the law. The bad guys seemed to escape punishment too often and the good guys, conscientious policemen, seldom received the credit due to them. It was an altogether shit job, shit pay, shit working conditions, shit promotional opportunities and the public and the media constantly heaped shit on them. It was difficult for a policeman of Barker’s seniority and position not to conclude that the big crims were winning. If a cop stayed in one precinct too long, eventually the bad guy and the good guy made some sort of compromise. This inevitably meant that the good guy was materially a lot better off and a lot less conscientious.

  Billy wasn’t sure that Barker was corrupt. Even if he was on the take, that didn’t mean he was involved with protecting paedophiles. The mention of his grandchildren suggested that he wasn’t, though you could never tell, humans have an amazing capacity to rationalise evil and to compartmentalise their lives. Maybe that was true of Barker, yet Billy thought not. His instinct told him the man was a traditional policeman, almost certainly with compromised values but only those he could live with. A paedophile club would be unlikely to be one of the contributors to his welfare.

  On the other hand, a code existed among his kind that you never dobbed your mates in, what you saw or knew about them stayed in the district. Billy couldn’t help observing to himself that the paradox was that cops and paedophiles followed the same no-talkies-noratting code. A bent policeman was, in effect, a brother-in-arms with the evildoers. Moreover, an honest cop contributed to the welfare of both by keeping his eyes closed and his mouth shut because to be a whistleblower was considered to be the worst crime a cop could commit.

  Gazing through the canopy of leaves above his bench and catching a glimpse of an occasional star that managed to penetrate the blaze of the city skyline, Billy concluded that what had happened with Barker was this quid pro quo among older policemen. Each had something on the other and thus an unspoken agreement to say nothing. He reasoned that Barker wasn’t helping to protect kiddy-sex or why would he have taken the trouble to warn Billy as explicitly as he had? He was by no means a fool, yet he’d pretended that Billy wasn’t worth a pinch of shit any more as a lawyer, despite Billy warning him that he was still a member of the legal profession. If he’d been involved with the paedophiles he’d have said very little and fingered Billy for a quiet demise, just another homeless person ending up dead, albeit one who’d once been a famous barrister. Tut-tut, such is life, evil will always be amongst us.

  Billy fell asleep reasonably certain that he would need to be careful but that his life wasn’t yet in danger. He speculated briefly on the change that had come over him. As a drunk, the merest suggestion by Marion that he might be thought of as a paedophile had sent him scurrying in a blind panic to Queensland. Now sober, he had faced up to a direct warning from an influential policeman and was about to fall asleep under the glorious stars, prepared to take his chances. Though he’d still kill for a drink, he’d taken a small leap forward on his second day out of captivity. ‘Well done, Billy,’ he said to himself as sleep closed him down for the night. Billy woke to the usual raucous laughter of his two feathered friends but then, his eyes still closed, he distinctly heard Ryan’s voice. ‘Jeez, where’d yiz get this cake and stuff, Billy?’

  Billy thought he must be dreaming, but the noise of Ryan’s mastication forced him to open his eyes. ‘That you, Ryan?’ he asked tentatively.

  ‘Yeah, hi, Billy,’ Ryan replied, his mouth crammed with a Maria delicacy.

  Billy sat up slowly, his second night hadn’t been much better than the first and he hurt in a dozen different places. Groaning, he was forced to grab hold of the back of the bench to pull himself up.

  ‘Me mum’s died of an overdose and me nana’s also dead and I’m in the shit,’ Ryan said in a matter-offact voice that, even in his bleary state, surprised Billy.

  ‘Yes, I know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Nah, me nana told me she was gunna die and it was me who killed me mum,’ Ryan said.

  Billy couldn’t believe what he’d just heard the boy say. ‘Hey, wait a minute, lad, I don’t believe that.’

  ‘It was in the newspaper. It was them Vietnamese from Cabramatta, they brought in this heroin, see, it was not like the other stuff, more pure or something, they’s called the 5T gang. They gimme some for me mum and they told me that was what killed her. It were in all the newspapers.’

  ‘Who is they? The Vietnamese? They told you?’

  ‘Nah, the woman, The Queenie, she said I’d killed me mum and if I ran away or told someone they’d tell the police.’ Ryan’s bravado suddenly collapsed and he started to howl. Billy reached out and grabbed him, pulling him against his chest. Ryan sobbed and sobbed, clinging to Billy, who was soon bawling himself. ‘They gunna catch me and put me in gaol and throw away the key,’ Ryan said.

  ‘No, mate, they’re not going to do that.’

  ‘That’s what they said!’ Ryan protested, sniffing and knuckling away his tears.

  ‘I’m not going to let that happen, Ryan,’ Billy said.

  ‘You’ll see, it will be all right.’

  The boy’s mouth was sticky from the baklava he’d been eating. He looked thin and pale and very frightened. He started to cry again. ‘They said I couldn’t tell anyone because I was a poofter. I’m not a poofter, am I, Billy?’ he asked.

  Billy put his arm around Ryan. ‘No, mate, you’re not,’ he said, trying to smile and make light of the matter, but he could feel the tears running down his own cheeks. ‘Come along now, you have a bit more of that cake, then you can tell me your story and I’ll tell you our plan. Okay?’

  Ryan looked at him doubtfully. ‘We’ve got a plan?’

  ‘Yes, son, we’ve got a plan.’

  ‘But yiz don’t know what happened.’

  ‘I know a fair bit and I hope you’re going to tell me the rest. That’s if you want to,’ Billy added gently. ‘You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Billy, why did you leave?’ Ryan asked suddenly.

  ‘You just went away and wrote me that letter, then me nana died and me mum.’

 
Billy tried hard to contain his emotions but, despite his efforts, Ryan could see that his chest was heaving as he fought to control his sobs. ‘Because I was a coward,’ he managed to stammer at last. ‘I ran away because I’m a coward, Ryan.’

  ‘No, you’re not, Billy. Did somethin’ happen?’ Billy explained as best he could. ‘Ryan, I am terribly sorry, I told myself at the time that I was doing it, going to Queensland, for both of our sakes, but I was lying to myself. I was frightened and wanted to save my own skin. I was a coward. If I’d stayed, then perhaps things might have turned out differently for you.’ Ryan didn’t reply and after a few moments, in order to cover the silence between them, Billy pointed to the plastic cartons on the ground, ‘If you don’t tuck into that, it will get stale.’

  Ryan helped himself to a honey puff and bit into it, chewing slowly. With his mouth still half full, he said, ‘Nah, it wouldn’t have changed nothin’, me nana was gunna die, she told me herself. She made me phone the funeral people and the cemetery to make sure they didn’t forget she’d paid them already.’

  ‘But what about your mother, perhaps I might have been able to help?’

  Ryan shook his head and Billy could see that the boy was trying to get him off the hook. ‘No way, me mum was crook and she wouldn’t have let you in, addicts don’t like straights to come near when they need a fix.’

  ‘Ryan, you do understand that if I’d been here we would have found another way to manage things?’ But Ryan was stubborn. ‘Ain’t no other way, Billy.’ Billy didn’t think he should take it any further, it was water under the bridge anyway. He’d failed Ryan and now it was up to him to make amends in any way he possibly could. ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me what happened?’ he asked.

  Ryan thought for a few moments before he took a deep breath. ‘You know how I told you me mum had asthma?’

  ‘Yes, and you’d take her to St Vincent’s.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it was true, but I didn’t tell you the other thing.’

  ‘You mean that she was a heroin addict?’

  ‘Yeah, that.’

  ‘I imagined you thought it was none of my business. Every family has things they like to keep private.’

  ‘It was just me and her and me nana, see. I knew what me mum done was wrong, but I done it also.’ Billy looked surprised. ‘Did what?’

  ‘I helped her with the smack, like preparing it. She’d get the shakes and start vomiting and she’d panic like it’s an attack. She can’t do nothin’ about it, sweat pourin’ off her, and sometimes she got the cramps and she’d beg me to help her to do the stuff. You know, get it ready.’ Ryan was plainly upset as he began to explain.

  Billy held up his hand. ‘Ryan, you don’t have to tell me, lad.’

  But Ryan seemed not to hear. Billy was almost certainly the first person, the only person he could talk to, whom he could trust. ‘I was seven when I done it first. Do you want to know how you do it, Billy?’

  Billy wasn’t sure how to answer. Plainly Ryan wanted to talk, the poor little bloke was carrying a terrible burden of guilt and Billy didn’t want to stop him talking. ‘I’d like to hear everything you have to say, lad.’

  ‘Well, a chunk, that’s fifty bucks worth, you place it on a spoon, like a spoon for eating puddin’?’ Billy nodded. ‘Then you take up so much water in the syringe,’ Ryan indicated the first joint of his pinkie, ‘and you squirt it into the spoon with the smack already in it. Then you get a lighter and you heat up the bottom of the spoon. You got to hold it real steady because the stuff melts and you can’t afford to spill it, see.’

  Billy was inwardly amused at Ryan’s caution that ‘you can’t afford to spill it’, which had obviously been a past injunction from his mother and had stuck in his small boy’s mind.

  ‘Oh, yes, I forgot. Before you start all that, you take this cotton wool and you roll a little ball about this size,’ Ryan indicated the nail of his forefinger. ‘When it’s melted, you drop the little ball in and it, you know, fluffs up like. Oh yes, and also you have to have this cotton bud, that’s to stir it when you’re warming it with the lighter so it melts quickly. After you’ve dropped the little ball in and it’s fluffed up, like I said, you push the tip o’ the syringe into the smack and you suck it up through the fluffed-up cotton wool.’ Ryan looked up, ‘You see, there’s impurities in heroin when they cut it with somethin’ else and this is the filter, see, so she don’t get stuff in her veins that shouldn’t go in, that’s bad for her.’

  Billy wanted to cry at the innocence. Again he was forced to admire Ryan’s ability to tell the process sequentially, or so it appeared, as Billy had no previous experience of how heroin was administered. If asked, he could probably have said that it involved a syringe together with a spoon and a tourniquet. Like everyone else in his generation, this information had come via Frank Sinatra’s part in the film The Man with the Golden Arm.

  ‘Now you done all that and there’s the torniket, that’s this, like, leather belt that you pull real tight around the top of yer arm and then keep makin’ a fist.’ Ryan demonstrated by opening and closing his fist. ‘It’s to pump up the vein so the needle will go in easy. You stick it in here,’ he pointed to the bend in his arm, ‘that’s the best place, see. You place the needle flat to the skin so it don’t wiggle too much and you push it in the vein. You must be careful you go up the vein and not through the side.’ Ryan paused. ‘Do yiz know what happens when you inject and you ain’t got it in proper?’

  Billy shook his head.

  ‘It will make this blister that burns like hell and it takes hours for the smack to get into the body.’ Ryan laughed. ‘I done it a few times and me mum wanted to kill me. But sometimes you can’t help it, she’s shaking and sweating and stuff and you get nervous and fuck it up.’

  ‘Did you have to do it for her all the time?’ Billy asked, trying not to show his horror at what Ryan had just told him.

  ‘Nah, only sometimes when she was real crook. She done it herself mostly.’

  Billy put his hand on Ryan’s shoulder. ‘I’m so sorry about your mother, lad. A boy should always have his mother to love him.’ Billy was conscious that it was an insensitive thing to say, but it had come out spontaneously.

  To his surprise Ryan didn’t start crying again but silently helped himself to an almond biscuit. With his mouth full, he said, ‘It’s orright, Billy, me nana said me mum wasn’t gunna make no old bones. I cried a lot about that before, when you’re a little kid you don’t want yer mum to die. I once asked her not to. I told her what nana said and she gave this laugh and said not to worry, she was gunna be around a fair while yet, but that she didn’t want to be like the old cow and wanted to have a bit of fun and be a good-lookin’ corpse.’

  Billy thought his heart would break at Ryan’s ingenuous retelling of the incident. ‘Ryan, you were a good son and grandson, you can always be proud of that. I wish I had been as caring and loving with my own mother and I hardly knew my grandmother.’

  Ryan grinned. ‘It’s easy, you just got to listen all the time and nod yer head and don’t interrupt and think of other things.’

  Billy laughed. ‘I’ve got two new Trim stories to tell you, Ryan.’

  ‘Cool!’ Ryan exclaimed, obviously excited. ‘When I was with them, I tried to think what Trim would’ve done but I don’t suppose cats know about them things.’

  ‘Ryan, would you like to tell me what happened?’ Billy asked tentatively, not wishing to push the boy.

  Ryan looked down at his feet, he had gone to sit on his skateboard at Billy’s feet with Maria’s two containers in front of him, one was already empty and now he started on the other. There was a long silence before he looked up slowly. ‘They made me do a bad thing, Billy.’

  ‘Tell me about it, lad. When you’re forced into doing a bad thing it’s not the same as doing a bad thing on your own.’

  ‘Yes it is! T
hey said if you’re a poofter then it don’t never go away. If you do it once, it’s the same as a hundred times.’ Ryan began to weep again, softly, sniffing, trying to control his misery. ‘I ain’t a poofter, Billy, I know I ain’t.’

  ‘No, of course you’re not, lad.’

  ‘But they said.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what they said, Ryan. It’s what’s in your heart. But who are they?’

  ‘The Queenie.’

  ‘Just The Queenie?’

  ‘No, and some of the men there.’

  ‘Why don’t you start at the beginning, lad?’ Billy said.

  ‘Didn’t you say you had a plan?’ Ryan asked.

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Am I in it?’ Ryan asked anxiously.

  ‘Of course, and you’ll be safe, I promise.’

  Ryan sniffed and wiped his snotty nose on the back of his hand, his face sticky with biscuit crumbs and honey. ‘It was two days after we buried my nana, and me mum woke up and said she felt crook. I asked her if I should call the ambulance, like you know, go to St Vinnie’s because of her asthma. But she said it weren’t bad asthma, just the flu or somethin’ like that. But she stayed in bed and that night when she was supposed to go to work she couldn’t. The next day she was the same, she tried to get up but she fell down and it took me ages to get her back in bed because she were too weak and couldn’t help me. She was sweatin’ and shiverin’ and then she threw up in the towel I brought to wipe her sweat. I seen it before – it’s the withdrawals. I know where she keeps her smack so I did it for her and she’s a bit better but next mornin’ she’s still crook and can’t get up.’

  Ryan explained that there was no more heroin in the house and his mother started to withdraw again. He went to St Vincent’s to see Dr Goldstein but was told that the doctor was on nights that week. The registrar saw him and Ryan explained that his mother was ill but he didn’t tell him she was a drug addict, and they hadn’t looked up her records as casualty was very busy at the time. The registrar told him if she got worse to call the ambulance or to see her GP in the morning. Ryan told him that Dr Goldstein was their GP, that he’d come in the past to see his nana and once before to see his mum when Ryan had asked him. The registrar said he’d leave a message.