by Peter Carey
Out in the dark world the hail was surely melting, and the hulls of massive clouds were sailing eastwards from the plains, presumably passing over the “secure location” where Gabrielle Baillieux wore a tracker anklet.
What would be a secure location? I wondered, imagining a slender ankle not so far away.
Woody sighed. His eyes were dull and clouded. I thought, he is really pissed off with something I have written. When he spoke he sounded nasty. “Can I give you some advice, mate?”
“We all have to wait for Gaby,” Celine interrupted anxiously. “Even me. The supporters need to approve of us.”
“So Gaby won’t see you?”
“Lay off, Felix,” Woody snarled.
But it was not him I was addressing: “Your daughter won’t see you,” I said. “That’s it, isn’t it, Celine? Woody’s paid for her and now she won’t even talk to you.”
Woody narrowed his eyes but I was still too high for caution. “If you guys can’t deliver Gaby, there is nothing here for me to do.”
Why did I lie like that? I don’t know. To stir him up? To take control? In any case, it had been a bad idea. He shivered like a horse. I recognised the symptoms. In a minute he would stamp his foot. This would be a bad event, I knew already. Even before he made a firearm of his hand, I understood.
Then here it was, the five-fingered pistol, pointed directly at my head. It was clearly time for Felix Moore to say goodnight.
IN THE MORNING there was no sign of Woody but I found Celine standing over the busy printer, pale as a corpse, dressed as she had been the night before. Her hair was like dry grass where wild animals have slept. She wearily considered me from behind large dark glasses.
Anyone else would have known that these sunglasses hid a blackened eye. Not me. “Are we going to the beach?” I reached for them and she slapped my hand away.
Anyone with half a brain would have known he had hit her. What I noticed was that she was intent on stealing my pages. “Then just give me back that bag,” I said.
“I need to read what you’ve done.”
I kept my temper. I stayed silent as she carried my writing to the bathroom. I waited for the shower but heard only the lock and then the hair dryer. I made coffee and calmly set out bowls, milk and cornflakes and a very short time later a freshly coiffed Celine was standing at the counter studying my offering from behind her shades. She had been sleeping with him, I was almost certain. He had always been a brute with women.
“Felix,” she said at last. “You were far sweeter than you remember. You were eighteen years old. You were so full of life. Why would you betray me now?”
So I had revealed her mad mother in a draft. Could she have read that? I would fix it. There was no cause for this hysteria. “Don’t go, Celine. I won’t betray you.”
“You won’t mean to. Stay clear of Woody.”
“You’re upset. Give me back my pages.”
“Yes I’m fucking UPSET. You’ve no idea what you’ve got yourself involved with. Don’t you get it: he’s playing the other side.”
But that was the one thing you could not say about Woody. He had been at my side during the dark nights of November 1975. He had coached me in my role for Drivetime Radio and when disaster struck he carried me to safety. He was incapable of playing for the other side.
“I dragged you into this,” she said. “Now the game has changed.”
I planned to rescue my pages but somehow she tricked me. “I’ll just be a moment,” she said. A second later the lift pinged and my pages were gone. As they descended in the dark, the rising sun raked the banks of the Yarra and made a mirror of the yellow office tower. It was then I remembered how Woody had pointed his imaginary pistol. I had glimpsed that private passionate creature, the son of the murdered man. My friend’s neck, his lips, his big sloping shoulders suggested a sexual underworld I had always chosen not to see, but this morning I recalled his first wife’s testimony in the divorce court. It was the first time it occurred to me that she might have told the truth.
It was a cold-skied Melbourne day and the blackwood wattles were blooming in the hills. As Flinders Street station turned to gold, I composed a careful email to Wodonga Townes wherein I regretted any distress I may have caused him, or Celine. I didn’t know what I had done, but I was sorry. I did not hold back. I confessed to being both blind and careless. I had no idea how true that was. I could only assume, I wrote, that they had stumbled on my last few weeks’ work, which would seem less grotesque when it was understood I had written it off my face on his Dexedrine. I crawled. I admitted to an ugly excess of ambition, the desire to make the story “rich” and “complex.” My own good sense, I explained, had already led me to conclude that much of the information was too personal. As for my overexcited interpretation of the daughter’s relationship with the mother, I had been out of line.
This was the general sort of abject letter I have had reason to compose many times before. I grovelled in my usual style. Once again I said I was an awful creature.
I sent the email and showered. Then I dressed in my new clothes which I expected to amuse my old fan on his return. It was a ludicrously expensive shirt and I was struggling with the unexpected cufflinks when I heard the knocking. I had not known there was a door to rap on, but I found it finally, in an unused laundry. If there was a light switch, I could not see it. There was not even a spy hole.
“Who’s that?”
“Felix?” It was a male voice, breathless.
“Who’s that?”
“Jesus Felix, it’s George. I’m knackered.”
What George? I knew no George. Whoever it was, he could walk back down and see the concierge. But then, of course, I wondered, was this what I was waiting for? The door had one of those brass security latches and I placed the hasp firmly over the hook and cracked the door.
I saw an unpleasant green shirt and, for a moment, a hairy arm. A gilt-edged card slid into the narrow crack. I thought, wedding invitation. Indeed I may have been correct, but the invitation’s purpose, in this context, was to flip the latch. Then all hell broke loose. I was rushed by a wide fellow with thinning hair and sweaty beard.
“No,” I shrieked.
I dropped my cufflinks. I took a mop and poked his gut. He ripped my weapon from me and broke it across his big bare knee and came at me with its lethal end. I stood on the cufflink and cut my foot.
“Don’t hurt me.”
“You stupid cunt, no-one’s going to hurt you.”
I had retreated to the living room. There were sharp knives in the kitchen, but of course he would have taken them away from me.
DISGRACED JOURNALIST STABBED TO DEATH.
“For fuck’s sake. Calm down. I’m here to take you to her. Don’t you have a notebook or something?”
I pulled the cufflink from my foot. I took a pen and chequebook and shoved them in my pocket. I backed towards the Steinway. “Her?”
“Nice place,” he said. “Does he really have eight parking spaces?”
I asked him who he was working for but he had different matters on his mind.
“I’m not going to walk down ninety flights,” he said. “Can we get into the car park directly from the lift?”
“I don’t know who you are.”
“I told you, I’m George. I’d have thought you’d remember me. George Olson. From Cottles Bridge.”
“It’s thirty years since I was in Cottles Bridge.”
“I’m not here to have a natter, mate. Give me the fucking key to the fucking lift.”
But you did not need a key to leave, and I soon found myself riding down with the intruder who smelled like old cleaning rags, BO, cigarettes, depression. This was not the sort of contact I had expected.
“Are you taking me to meet a certain young lady?”
“That’s right, mate. I’m going to have to hide you on the way out, OK mate?”
“At a secure location, let’s say.”
“That’s right.”
“Are you a potter?” I asked him but he was busy opening the boot, sorting through an unappetising tangle of crocheted rugs and quilts. He selected an unsavoury lemon-coloured blanket and held it up as if for size.
“OK?” he asked. I had no time to answer because he wrapped the blanket round my head.
“Don’t panic.”
I was mainly worried about my suit. “How long do I need to keep it on?”
“Just till we get going.”
And with that the bastard picked me up. It was then, in his fierce embrace, I knew I had been kidnapped. I screamed with fright.
“Shut up,” he cried and dumped me in the boot.
You work for property developers this is what they do to you.
I WAS a complete idiot. I would die now, because I could not acknowledge what was clearly true, which I had always known, that my greatest admirer was capable of anything.
How pathetic that I had got myself entangled in his love affairs. I did not even know what my offence was, or why Celine should be so afraid, but I would die without my decent law-abiding daughters knowing I was something better than a drunken arsonist. They would never see me in a decent suit. They would not imagine how I loved them or what I had suffered, nor imagine these smells inside this airless coffin, wet burlap and mould, the odour of real Melbourne crime. My father once traded in a Holden and discovered £10,000 hidden in its doors. Being a Holden, the door had filled with water and all the money turned to pulp which smelled like this exactly. I could not breathe. I found a tyre lever and began to beat the boot lid. The car slowed, accelerated violently, then pulled off the road. I heard the driver’s door open and slam shut.
A key entered the lock. The lid cracked open. I saw a slice of my kidnapper’s bright red lips.
“I can’t breathe.”
“If you hit my car again,” he spoke with chilling deliberation, “I’ll tear your fucking throat out. Do you understand that? Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“What the fuck got into you? Are you mad?”
“I can’t breathe.”
“Here.” He pushed a paper bag through the gap.
“What’s this?”
By the time I understood what was in the bag, we were on a freeway and I knew I was a dead man. Vodka, to help me through my execution. It would be a western suburbs murder but committed in the east, a nail gun, probably, on sale at Mitre 10 at Thomastown, six-inch nails inside my skull.
What would you have done? I had Woody’s number on speed dial but when I called he had his phone turned off. We all used to laugh about Woody. We used to say that the Big Fella knew where the bodies were buried. Now I drank his vodka and prayed the exhaust fumes might have me dead before we reached my destination. Then I dialled again.
My kidnapper drove on and on and I must have called Woody’s number twenty times. Then we left the freeway and then—an hour from Moroni’s—we were off the sealed road and were bumping along one of those dirt tracks which had once allowed me to pretend that I had escaped suburbia. I should have called my daughters but I would have cried. They could never know what a dirt road used to signify. They had grown up city kids. They would laugh to think of their father even chopping wood.
I wondered if he would stop to buy the nail gun or if he already had it. The road was so rough I wished it would knock me out. I phoned Woody one more time.
“Hi Felix, where are you?”
“In a car.”
He laughed, sadistic bastard.
“Woody, I didn’t mean to be hurtful about Celine.”
Long silence.
“That’s the last thing I wanted to do.”
Another pause before he spoke. “Didn’t sound like that last night.”
“I am an appalling creature.”
“Felix, don’t say another word. You’ve been making that grovelling speech for thirty years.”
“You’re right, mate.”
“Did it ever occur to you that I might go public with that Drivetime Radio event?”
“What part?”
“The chickenshit part.”
“Oh, mate, you wouldn’t.”
He would though, the bastard. He had my moral cowardice in the bank and he would be a hard man if he had to. He could destroy my left-wing reputation in a heartbeat.
“I’m thinking I’m not suited to this project, Woody.”
“You’re not trying to renege are you?”
“I can give you the money back.”
“Feels, you signed the fucking contract.”
Jesus. “You still want me to write it?”
“Why would I put up with you otherwise?”
I could not ask him, why am I still in a car boot? “I’m up for it, mate,” I said. So long as you want to continue, mate. I really wanted to continue in every sense.
Was he laughing? It wasn’t clear. “That’s good,” he said. “We don’t want misunderstandings.”
“Just one thing.”
“Got to go, mate. We’re taking off.”
“Woody, is there something you need to cancel?”
But he was gone, and when I called Celine I got her voicemail. I had never used a GPS before but this was a brand-new iPhone and it told me we were just past Eltham where Claire and I began our family. Long weekends of planting tiny trees, station wagons all coated with yellow dust, the smell of wattle, and that pungent blackcurrant smell from the deep gullies of the bush, all the rural beatniks from Eltham and Cottles Bridge sniffing at each other’s bums. In those years I worked the police beat in the city and came back home to this non-suburbia, mudbrick houses, slate floors. You got an excessive amount of adultery in the so-called “extended community” but not a lot of murdered men. Eltham was rutting ground but not much worse.
I dialled Woody. He was gone. I was sweating in private places. The car was pulling to a stop. I drained the awful vodka and took the tyre lever in my hand so, when the lid was lifted, I was crouched inside, my back in agony, my calves both cramped.
“Oh Felix!” The kidnapper relieved me of the lever as he helped me out one hand beneath my arm. He threw the lever back into the boot.
“You remember a piece of arse named Skye Olson?”
“You’re her husband.”
“I’m her son you twat.”
He spat at my feet and climbed back behind the wheel. I remembered a little boy with a curled lip and big black accusing eyes.
“What now?” I asked.
“I’m off home mate.”
“What about me?”
It was an open invitation for him to tell me I could fuck myself. Instead he pointed up the hill where two pale tyre tracks were interrupted by the evidence of a vigorous four-wheel drive engagement.
FORTY-FIVE KILOMETRES FROM the Melbourne GPO, I crossed a narrow creek and came upon a burned-out jeep with wild blackberries growing through its broken eyes and imagined every possibility at once, not only Woody’s enforcers but also Angel’s angry “supporters” waiting to grill a reporter from “the mainstream media.”
I was not a brave man. I never said I was. Two rutted wheel tracks had once continued up the hill but now they were swallowed by wattles and all the regrowth that follows fire. It looked like Eltham in the 1950s when tracks like these led to the homes of communists and free lovers and artists and bullshitters of all varieties. Beyond the fallen fence there was a stand of peeling paperbar
ks, no path other than that indicated by a piece of blue rope that might mean something if you knew. Children had left dirty drawings on the tattered white bark, broken crayons on the ground. Why did this seem sinister? Beyond these melaleucas was a rise on which stood a stand of slender white-barked eucalypts. From here one looked down on a sea of creeper which had colonised a long flat tin roof and a cedar pergola. Sensing a surprise might be dangerous to my health I called, “Coo-ee.”
A woman said hello. And I saw what I expected although, honestly, who could have anticipated the gorgeous white pyjamas or Monet’s broken light. My suit was like nothing I had ever owned. It had the faintest hint of indigo hidden in its charcoal, like a crow’s feather reflecting the sky. As I descended the rocky steps I was alive to every sense and colour. My hair thrilled on my neck.
“Felix Moore,” I called.
“I know who you are,” said Celine Baillieux.
I thought, fuck you. “It was you who kidnapped me? You locked me in a fucking coffin.”
“That was not the plan,” she said and she was monstrous in her injury, the whole of her lower left eyelid both black and purple, swollen, shocking, inflamed and ugly like baboon sex. She slid open a slick glass door and I followed her. She paused. She turned. And slapped me, twice. I saw sparks. My ear went dull. “You cunt,” she said.
For what? I had already been punished, tortured even. I realised my lovely suit jacket was torn, revealing stuffing like a sofa at an auction. Onward I tottered, entering a baronial room with a brick floor and heavy beams and long dark refectory table whose surface was awash with that pearl-white manuscript. My assailant walked to the big slate-floored kitchen and filled a glass with water, then again, then again. Her back was to me, but as the tap turned on and off I could hear mad rage knocking in the pipes.