by Peter Temple
Dodging drug dealers and their customers, we walked to a Lebanese place in Smith Street where they knew me.
Seated in the window, I said, ‘How’s the film business?’
Boz shook her head. ‘Shithouse. I’m thinkin of givin it away. There’s a bloke called Sewell moves a lot of art and antiques, wants to pack it in, sell the business. Problem is I can’t work out what I’d be buyin.’
‘How’s that?’
‘It’s about ninety per cent goodwill, no contracts or anythin, just customers he’s had for twenty years. They could take one look at me and say so long Maryanne.’
‘You know that number? Tell him you want to go through the books. Work out the percentage of turnover from each of the regular customers. Then go and see them and ask if they’ll carry on hiring the firm if you buy it.’
She looked at me, fork poised. ‘I could do that?’
‘If he says no, walk away. How old’s this bloke?’
Through the window, a few metres away, I could see a boy of about thirteen, a thin boy, face sharpened by the street, peachfuzz on his chin. He was someone’s child, lost into the world like a puppy into an open drain, now waiting for something, someone, agitated, scratching, licking his lips, rubbing his small nose. The person came, older, bigger, stood close to him, obscured him.
‘Fifty maybe, around there,’ said Boz.
The boy was gone. Two girls, older, late teens, dirty hair, faces pierced in three places, were on the spot, heads moving, looking in different directions. One clutched a plastic bag.
‘You’ll need a restraint of trade in the contract,’ I said.
‘Pardon?’
‘How old are you?’
‘Am I asking a stupid question?’
‘No. I’m just losing touch with ages. I need a baseline.’
‘Thirty-six. A week ago.’
‘Happy birthday.’
‘Thank you.’
Her eyes were the colour of wet slate.
‘Restraint of trade. It stops him selling you the business and then starting a new one in opposition to you. He’s young enough to try that.’
‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘I know fuck-all about business.’
‘Do the looking at the books bit,’ I said, ‘then come and see me about the contract. I’m cheap.’
‘McCoy says living opposite your office is a risk.’
She’d been told the story.
‘McCoy likes to generalise. He’s had one unfortunate experience in the street. No-one forced him to throw his chainsaw into a passing vehicle.’
She paid and we walked back to Charlie’s in halfhearted rain. I went around to the driver’s side of the van with her. Her hair held drops of water. She brushed a hand over her scalp, dispelled the moisture. ‘Got any other libraries to put in, I’m your person,’ she said, getting into the cab. ‘I like your libraries.’
‘The person of choice. You will be that person.’
She looked down at me. ‘Jack,’ she said, ‘not to fuck about, I suppose you’re taken.’
So plain a question.
‘At this moment in time,’ I said, ‘no.’
‘I’m the same. Well, give me a ring. Business or social.’ She started the engine. ‘Here’s looking down at you, kid.’
I watched her take the top-heavy old van around the tight corner, stood for a while, thinking. Boz.
No. The world was already too much with me.
13
At the office, the answering machine was signalling me.
Jack, it’s Morris. Listen, I want a letter to Krysis. The neighbour says the bastard’s storing stuff in the garage again. Tell him he’s trespassing and we’ll kick his arse. Today, Jack, do it today. Cheers.
Morris, father of Stan the publican.
Jack, Morris again. I forgot to say the prick’s pushed the offer up another thirty grand. I told him not interested. He says he wants to talk to you. Tell him your instructions are he should piss off and stop wasting my time. Okay? Cheers.
Ditto. Someone wanted to buy his two adjoining properties in Brunswick, a more than generous offer as I understood it, but Morris couldn’t contemplate life without them.
Don’t let them tell you Robbie Colburne was just a casual barman.
A woman. Them? Who would they be? Xavier Doyle and company?
Jack, the Brunswick Street one, that lease finishes next month. Bastard rang the other day, wants to talk. Don’t want to know him, he’s out.
Morris, again. His Brunswick Street tenant was indeed deserving of the slipper, an habitual nonpayer.
I sat down and gave Robbie Colburne some thought. Queensland. He’d told The Green Hill he’d worked in Queensland. I rang a man in Sydney called D.J. Olivier. He said he’d ring me back. As far as my assets went, my credibility with D.J. ranked just behind my half of the boot factory. Then I opened my mail, threw most of the contents into the bin, took that into the back room and emptied it into a green garbage bag. After that, I made a cup of tea and sat at my table to read the latest issue of the Law Institute Journal. There were many things of interest in it, even some I understood, including recent findings of the legal profession tribunal regarding professional misconduct. Accounts of the venality of some of my colleagues left me greatly distressed. Distressed but not surprised.
I went to my window. Heavier rain now, steady plinks on the pools in the gutter. The lights were on in McCoy’s abode across the street, presumably to assist him in committing some disgusting act on canvas. Or elsewhere.
The phone rang.
‘Here’s a number,’ said D.J. Olivier. ‘It’s good for an hour or so.’
I drove around to the Prince, parked in the loading zone around the corner. Inside, I found no youthful pioneers of the cyberfrontier energising themselves with the fermented juice of radiated Russian potatoes. The nicotine-dark chamber held only a mildly alcoholic accountant called George Mersh, who played seven games for Fitzroy, and Wilbur Ong and Norm O’Neill, both strangers to the cyber and approaching a frontier from which noone returned.
They saw me, mouths opened like demanding chicks spotting the parent bird.
I heard the words unspoken, raised a hand. The mouths closed.
‘Not today,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to hear about it today.’
We would speak of the Saints’ inglorious performance but not while the memory was so fresh. Raw. I rapped on the counter and opened the flap.
Stan appeared.
‘The phone,’ I said.
‘Your professional uses his mobile,’ he said, and smirked.
‘It’s the new asbestos. Don’t you read the papers, Stan? Worse than stuffing bits of asbestos into your ear.’
His eyed opened wide, then a knowing look came over his face. ‘What do you take me for?’
‘An enigma wrapped in a mystery. Three beers. And have something yourself. Have, what is it, a Wally?’
He shook his head. ‘Jesus, Jack. Stolly. Really.’
I went into the pub’s office/archive. The telephone was under one of Stan’s jumpers, which I moved with a rolled-up newspaper. Cautiously. Then I cleaned the handset with a paper napkin I found marking a place in a paperback called Get a New e-Life: Cybertactics for Small Business, and dialled.
‘Done the immediate stuff,’ said D.J. Olivier. ‘Queensland, driver’s licence, issued 1992, renewed January 1996, and most recently six weeks ago. Otherwise, he’s not on the books.’
Robert Gregory Colburne had no tax file number and was not registered with Medicare.
‘MasterCard, six weeks old, limit ten grand, it’s 600-odd in credit.’
‘Address?’
‘Brissie. Red Hill. Also for electoral roll. No phone in the name now or ever. There’s just one possible lippy smudge on this collar.’
‘Yes?
‘The name got a passport in 1996. Departed Sydney, April ’96, but there’s no mention of a return arrival.’
‘How can that be?’
; ‘Well, sometimes they come back in a sailing boat, tramp steamer, fucking hang-glider, land in Broome, Top End, Tassie somewhere, there’s not always a record gets on file. Till they try to leave through Customs again, nothing shows.’
‘Anything else?’
‘No traces at the moment between April ’96 and the licence renewal and credit card issue six weeks ago. Oh and he enrolled at Sydney Uni in ’91. Seems to have dropped out in the first year. He’s not there in ’92.’
‘What school?’
‘Walkley. Up there somewhere to buggery over the mountains. You go through Bathurst. I think.’
I thanked D.J. and joined Wilbur and Norm. The subject of St Kilda could not be postponed. We had a fact-free exchange of views. The new development today was that both students of the game found some positive things to say about the Saints’ appalling performance. Most of them would have escaped less scholarly eyes. It had been that way with Fitzroy through the many dark seasons, the times without comfort or hope, all our enemies grown taller and swifter, their hands bigger and stickier, their boots crafted to kick impossible bananas and their foul blows, trips and gouges apparently invisible to umpires.
Cheered, I left before the IT crowd arrived. If they were ever coming back. As I turned the corner, the rain paused. The air was cold, deceptively clean-smelling. I could hear water running in the gutters, a flow of toxic liquid heading for the river and the bay.
On the way home, Linda Hillier was on the radio, where I’d left her, on 3KB.
Congratulations. You’re listening to Melbourne’s smartest station, and that says something about you.
Tonight we’re talking about drugs. Heroin users complained on radio this morning that they were treated like second-class citizens. Well, the man I’m about to talk to, the Reverend Allen O’Halloran, says that’s what they are. What’s your view? The number to call is, and bookmark it in what passes for your phone’s mind…
One day, I would phone in. One day when I had the words to speak to Linda.
At home. A fire. No, too much effort. I put on the heating, went to the kitchen, began the defrosting of Sunday’s stew and opened a bottle of the exemplary Mill Hill chardonnay. Then I slumped in the armchair, switched on the television for the news.
Innocents dying, the guilty walking free, nature mocking the frailty of human habitations, a hijacking, a royal birth, a supermodel on drug charges, a politician caught out in a lie, a cat’s incredible sewer journey, the death of a revered pornographer and the legal battle over his archive of people doing things. Sport. And weather, a map, a man who knew about weather: cold, rain, the possibility of periods without the latter.
Watching this necklace of images strung in some electronic bunker, a part of my mind that bicycled along dull streets and sat on benches overlooking nothing was thinking about Robbie Colburne.
What to make of Robbie? Gets into university. Drops out. Runs up debts. Departs for foreign shores in 1996. Not recorded as coming back. Four years later, back nevertheless, renews his driver’s licence and, notwithstanding his credit history, gets a credit card with a $10,000 limit. Appears in Melbourne with a small but expensive wardrobe, gets a casual job as a barman, dies of a drug overdose.
A short but puzzling life.
Someone had to know more about Robbie. Someone had to be able to put some coherence into this narrative. It was just a question of who. The woman who left the message on the answering machine knew something. But I didn’t know who she was.
I rang Cyril Wootton on his latest mobile number. The numbers changed all the time.
‘You wish to make contact with me?’ he said. ‘How unusual. That’s twice in a few days. The hole in the ozone layer, El Pino, to what do I owe this?’
‘Nino. El Nino. Pina Colada. Expensive, this thing.’
‘How much?’
‘Yes or no. I’m happier with no.’ I didn’t want to go travelling.
‘Yes, if properly accounted for.’
‘Was it not ever thus?’
‘Ever thus my arse,’ said Wootton.
‘Really, Cyril,’ I said, ‘at times your vocabulary is at odds with your appearance. Your carefully cultivated appearance.’
14
The town of Walkley was a long and narrow blanket thrown over the spine of a ridge running out the back of the Great Dividing Range. To get there, you drove out of Sydney and on through hard country, high, gaunt, dry. Everywhere black rock broke the thin skin of soil, erosion gullies furrowed the slopes. The light was white and offended my city eyes.
I drove around until I found the school, it wasn’t difficult, parked the hired Corolla outside the only brick building. The wind was a shock, buffeting, frozen hands pressing against my face.
A sign took me past murmuring classrooms to the principal’s office. In the anteroom, a stone-faced woman, big, sat on a stool behind a counter. She looked at me and asked, ‘You’re not Telstra, are you?’
‘No.’
‘Bastards. Kin I do for you?’
‘Carly?’
‘Yes.’
‘I spoke to you yesterday. Jack Irish. The lawyer from Melbourne.’
‘Oh.’ She looked less stony. ‘Well. Melbourne. My little sister lives in Doncaster.’
‘I’m told it’s a great place to live. Does she like it?’
Wince, shrug of big shoulders.
‘He’s a paramedic. She met him in Bali. This bloke with them, he was dancing, fell over. Heart. Young, too. Everyone panicked. Denzil just went over, pushed everyone away, sat on the bloke, got the ticker going.’
‘Saved his life.’
‘No. Well, for a bit. Anyway, Carol’s down there with him. In Doncaster. Supposed to get married but it’s bin six years.’
‘It’s a big step. Giving it a lot of thought.’
‘Yeah.’ She passed a hand over her right temple. ‘That or he’s got somethin else goin.’
Time to move on from Doncaster. ‘The principal’s in?’
Carly rose with difficulty and went to the door at the back of the room, knocked, waited, opened it and put her head in.
‘The man from Melbourne’s here,’ she said. ‘Mr Irish. He rang yesterday.’
She waved me in.
The principal was behind a bare desk in a big, light room with school photographs on one wall and a large whiteboard covered with diagrams and lists on another. He stood up and put out a hand.
‘David Pengelly.’
‘Jack Irish.’
We shook hands and sat down. He had wispy hair combed across his scalp and a thin, worried face, the face of a farmer forever anxious about weather and weeds and the bank.
‘Long way to come.’
‘Excuse for a drive. I had business in Sydney.’
‘Carly says you’re asking about a student.’
‘He would have finished about ten years ago. Robert Gregory Colburne.’
‘What’s it in connection with?’
‘He died suddenly. No-one knows anything about his family, next of kin. I was asked to look into it.’ All true.
Pengelly scratched his scalp with one finger, taking care not to disturb hair. ‘Ten years,’ he said. ‘That’s a problem.’
I waited.
‘The records used to be in a demountable out the back,’ he said, pointing. ‘Burnt down in ’94, my first year here. Couldn’t save anything. Kids. Year twelves, just after the exams.’
‘Anyone still on the staff from 1990?’
He pulled a face. ‘Ann Pescott. That’d be about it. Been packing it in, all the senior ones.’
‘Could I talk to her? It would only take a minute.’
Silence while he studied me. Then he got up and went to the door. ‘Carly, ask Ann Pescott to step in for a minute, will you?’
He came back. ‘Died suddenly?’
‘Drugs,’ I said. ‘Accidental.’
‘Not much accidental about drugs. I used to teach in Sydney, in the west. Kids shooting up in the to
ilet block. Got away first chance I could.’ He looked out of the window at a sad stand of eucalypts moving in the wind. ‘Can’t get away from it though. Can’t get away from anything, can you?’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘No.’ He was studying me again. ‘I wanted to be a lawyer. Had the marks. My parents didn’t have the money.’
I didn’t have anything to say to that. There was a knock at the door and a woman in her forties came in, not confidently. I stood up.
‘Ann, this is Mr Irish, a lawyer,’ said Pengelly. ‘It’s about a kid from years ago. What was the name?’
I shook hands with Ann Pescott. She had an intelligent face, lines of disappointment, nervousness in her eyes: cared too much, waited too long.
‘Robert Gregory Colburne. He started at Sydney University in 1991, so 1990 would probably…’
Her face was blank. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Colburne, I don’t remember a Colburne. But I didn’t have the seniors then.’ Her eyes apologised for failing me. ‘Sorry.’
‘He’d have been a bright student.’
‘No. He didn’t come through me.’ She swallowed. ‘Must have arrived in eleven or twelve. There were a few new kids around from Forestry around then.’
‘Forestry?’
‘Conservation and Forestry, whatever it was called then, changes its name every year. They sent a whole lot of people up here from Sydney. Regionalisation I think it was called. Total disaster, city people, they all hated it and then the government changed and they all went back.’
‘So people around here would remember them?’
She shrugged. ‘Well, yes. Some. I suppose.’
‘Where should I start?’
A siren sounded, a harsh noise.
Ann Pescott’s eyes went to Mr Pengelly.
‘They’ll probably find their own way out,’ he said. ‘Animals generally do when the door’s open.’
‘Terry Baine at the newsagents,’ she said. ‘He would have been around in 1990. And they know everything, the Baines.’
I thanked Mr Pengelly and Ann Pescott for their time, together and separately. He seemed sad to see me go. I understood. On my way out, I thanked Carly.
‘Got a card?’ she said. ‘You never know. My sister might need a lawyer in Melbourne.’