by Gilling, Tom
The traffic stopped and they crossed the road.
‘Sydney?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Whereabouts in Sydney?’
‘North.’
‘You didn’t like it?’
‘It was okay. I felt like a change.’
The agent smiled, as if the thought of voluntary change amused him. They turned the corner into De Carle Street and walked in silence until Nick spotted the ‘For Lease’ sign across the street.
The weatherboard cottage looked as though it had been vacant for some time. The front garden was overgrown with weeds and there were rain-sodden brochures and snail-chewed envelopes all over the concrete path. The kitchen floor was covered with ancient green linoleum. A window pane on one side had been broken and there was a vague smell of wet carpet but there appeared to be nothing wrong with the house that a handyman couldn’t fix.
‘Why did the last tenant move out?’ Nick asked.
The agent shrugged again. ‘Why does any tenant move out?’
‘Didn’t they say?’
‘Not to me,’ said the agent, opening a cupboard and shutting it again. ‘They left some things in the garage.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Furniture. Nothing expensive. I think there’s a small refrigerator in there.’
‘Do you mind if I have a look?’
The agent unlocked the garage door. ‘Go ahead.’
He was right. The abandoned furniture wasn’t expensive but it was in pretty good condition and would enable Nick to move straight in. Apart from the refrigerator there was a formica kitchen table and two chairs, a 1950s veneer wardrobe, a small chest of drawers, and some cardboard boxes containing plates and cutlery.
The agent was waiting for him in the garden. ‘So—do you think you might be interested?’
‘I am interested,’ said Nick.
‘The rent is $240 a week.’
Nick didn’t know if that was fair or not. It was the first place he’d looked at. He had three and a half thousand dollars left, and some cheques he didn’t dare cash. He would have to start looking for a job.
‘What about animals?’ he asked.
‘What about them?’
‘I’ve got a dog.’
The agent shrugged.
‘Make it $220 and I’ll take it.’
The agent locked the house and they walked back to the office. As they waited at the pedestrian crossing he gave Nick his business card. His name was Terry Lawless and, like many real estate agents, he was a justice of the peace. Nick slipped the card into his wallet. A justice of the peace was exactly what Kevin Chambers was going to need.
That night Nick switched on the television in his room at the Sunset Lodge Motor Inn to see pictures of Harry Grogan and his ashen-faced wife, emerging from St John’s Anglican Church in Darlinghurst after the funeral of their son.
The police had found nothing to indicate that Danny Grogan’s overdose was anything other than accidental. Nick wondered how hard they had looked—how hard Harry Grogan had wanted then to look.
The Age was not the only newspaper to point out the 10 percent plunge in the share price of Grogan Constructions in the forty-eight hours that followed Danny’s accident, and to calculate that—at least on paper—his son’s heroin habit had cost Harry Grogan nearly one hundred million dollars.
Since Danny had never shown the slightest interest in running his father’s company Nick found it hard to see why its shareholders were so shaken by his loss. Nevertheless Harry Grogan was forced to issue a statement coolly assuring them that the future of Grogan Constructions was ‘unaffected’ by his son’s death. Was it true—or simply the sort of formulaic reassurance that timorous shareholders needed from time to time to steady their nerves?
The media seemed to have lost interest in the fate of Nick Carmody. At an internet cafe in the city, Nick found himself banished to the Star’s online archives. What could he expect? The life of a tabloid news story was about the same as the life of a carton of milk: at the Star news arrived with a use-by date. In the space of a week Nick Carmody had been transformed from news to its antithesis: old news.
If you believed the editorials in the Daily Star there were tens, even hundreds of thousands of people in Australia who never filed a tax return. In theory Nick knew it would be possible to survive like that for a while: as a non-person, an itinerant with no tax-file number, no driver’s licence, no passport, no criminal record, no credit history. But sooner or later even a non-person would need to see a doctor and for that they would need a Medicare card—or a good reason for not having one. Once the non-person had found his or her way onto one database, they would be searched for on others. Some government computer in Penrith or Hobart or Bunbury would discover a driver’s licence that had expired and never been renewed, a superannuation fund that hadn’t been touched in years—and Nick Carmody would come magically back to life.
His years as a crime reporter had taught him that identity was a pyramid. At the apex of the pyramid was a passport or a driver’s licence with a photograph; at the bottom were electricity bills and store cards. You could use document A to get document B, then use document b to get document C, until you had everything you needed to be a legitimate member of Australian society. He already had a passport in the name Kevin Chambers but the photograph was old and didn’t look anything like Nick. He could report it stolen and attempt to get a replacement but it wouldn’t be easy. Passport fraud was a hot issue these days and governments everywhere were cracking down. Besides, Nick had no use for a passport. He wasn’t planning to travel anywhere. What he did need was a driver’s licence with his own photograph, tangible proof of his new identity—a document he could trust implicitly, and which he could use to obtain other documents.
Nick wasn’t sure how much longer he could go on using Chambers’ credit card. He’d assumed that Chambers would cancel the card as soon as he discovered it was missing. He’d even rung the stolen cards hotline, pretending to have found it, only to discover that Kevin Chambers’ card had never been reported lost. Since then Nick had used the credit card only once, at a supermarket in the city, where there was no risk of being remembered.
It worried him that Chambers hadn’t cancelled the card. If his plan was to come after Nick then the credit card would tell him where to start looking. The sooner Nick stopped using it, the better. Was Kevin Chambers the kind of man who took the law into his own hands? Nick hadn’t forgotten the gun, and he guessed that Chambers wouldn’t have forgotten it either.
On Friday afternoon Nick was to hand over his bond money and the balance of the first month’s rent in advance, and in return receive the keys to number 75 De Carle Street. On Thursday morning he used Kevin Chambers’ driver’s licence to hire a car from Avis in Elizabeth Street. The man behind the counter was only interested in his credit card and didn’t even look at the photo on the licence. Nick would return the car undamaged and with a full tank of petrol, then the credit card imprint would be destroyed. He would settle the bill with cash and no one would be any the wiser. After hiring the car Nick drove to a chemist’s in St Kilda and had some passport photographs taken. In the afternoon he drove out to Coburg.
Terry Lawless had his back to the door. He was transferring files from one grey metal cabinet to another. At the sound of the bell he turned round. He looked surprised to see Nick. He stopped what he was doing and walked to his desk and glanced sheepishly at the calendar.
‘Didn’t we say Friday?’
‘We did say Friday.’
‘Is there a problem?’
‘Maybe, Terry. I hope not. You see…I’ve just lost my wallet.’
Lawless sat down. ‘Lost?’
‘I was robbed. This morning. Someone picked my pocket.’
‘That’s terrible. You’ve reported it to the police?’
‘Of course. But what are the police going to do?’
Nick could see Lawless working through the implicatio
ns in his head, trying to discern whether this was just an inconvenience or something more serious.
‘What was in the wallet?’
‘Some cash. All my cards. My driver’s licence. Everything.’
‘You must cancel the cards.’
‘It was the first thing I did.’
Lawless breathed a sigh of relief. ‘How much money was in the wallet?’
‘It’s not the money I’m worried about. It’s my driver’s licence. I can’t work without it.’
‘You must apply for a new one. They will understand. People lose wallets all the time.’
‘They’ll want some ID,’ said Nick. ‘The trouble is, all my stuff ’s in Sydney. If I can’t arrange things from here I’ll have to go back for it. I won’t be able to take the house.’ He sat down. ‘Unless you can help me, Terry.’
Lawless didn’t say anything but Nick could guess what he was thinking. He’d already let slip that the cottage in De Carle Street had been in his window for nearly six months. Now that he’d spent money on having the carpets cleaned and replacing the broken window, he couldn’t afford to lose the lease.
The agent shifted awkwardly in his seat. ‘How?’
‘You’re a JP. You can speed things up for me.’
Lawless smiled modestly. ‘I don’t think so, Mr Chambers.’
Nick unzipped his rucksack and took out a form he’d downloaded from an internet cafe near the university. ‘This is an application for a replacement licence.’
‘Yes,’ said Lawless, glancing at the form. ‘I’ve seen this form.’
‘All you need to do is sight the documents and say you’ve seen them.’
‘They must be original documents.’
‘That’s the problem, Terry. I need a new driver’s licence. The old one was stolen. If I can prove to you that I had the licence, will that be good enough for you?’
Lawless looked agitated. ‘I don’t know, Mr Chambers. I am a justice of the peace.’
‘That’s why I came to you, Terry. Because you’re a justice of the peace. And you know me. And after all the trouble you’ve gone to I’d hate not to be able to take the house.’
Nick unfolded the yellow duplicate copy of the Avis car rental agreement and laid it on the desk. ‘Here’s my licence number. Address. Date of birth. Obviously I had the licence with me when I rented the car this morning. All you have to do is pretend you’ve seen it. I’ll say the old one was damaged. Nobody is going to bother checking.’ He took out the envelope containing his new passport photograph. ‘Of course,’ he added casually, ‘you’ll need to certify that it’s me in the picture.’
After reading the form, Lawless said, ‘I’m supposed to see the licence.’
‘But the licence was stolen. That’s why I’m here.’
Lawless attempted to push the form back across the desk. ‘I think maybe you should ask someone else to do this.’
‘Who else can I ask? I’ve come to you because I trust you. I can hardly expect a total stranger to vouch for me. It’s not as if I’m trying to deceive anyone. If someone hadn’t stolen my wallet I wouldn’t be wasting my time filling in forms.’
‘You are certain the licence was stolen?’
‘Yes.’
Lawless picked up the passport photograph and stared at it. ‘It certainly looks like you.’
‘Of course it’s me. I only had it taken an hour ago.’
Lawless put the photograph down and picked up the form and read it again.
Sensing that he was going to get what he wanted, Nick felt guilty for his crude emotional blackmail. Terry Lawless seemed like a nice man: decent, old-fashioned, pedantic, and anxious to be liked. On the desk was a framed picture of a younger Terry and a pretty woman in a summer dress and sun hat. Nick remembered the phone call he’d witnessed the last time he was in the office. He picked up the photograph and heard himself ask, ‘Is this your wife?’
A rueful look came over the agent’s face. ‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘Myself and my wife.’
Nick put the photograph back on the desk and for a few moments they both stared at it.
‘Yes,’ the agent said at last. ‘I think perhaps I can do as you ask. It is only a small request and the alternative is…’ His voice petered out as if he wasn’t exactly sure what the alternative was.
‘Thank you,’ said Nick. ‘You’ve saved me a lot of trouble.’
Lawless smiled weakly as he reached for his pen. ‘It is not your fault, after all, that your wallet was stolen.’
Nick watched in silence as Lawless copied the number of Kevin Chambers’ driver’s licence from the duplicate rental agreement and signed the form and passed the pen to Nick so that he could witness his signature at the bottom. Then he certified the photograph and handed everything back across the desk.
‘Until tomorrow then,’ said Nick, standing up.
‘Yes,’ Lawless agreed. ‘Until tomorrow.’
A fortnight later Kevin Chambers’ replacement driver’s licence was delivered to his door. The next day a letter arrived from Telstra confirming the details of his twenty-four month phone plan. Nick wrote immediately to the New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, quoting Kevin Chambers’ date of birth and requesting a copy of the birth certificate he claimed to have lost while moving house. As proof of his identity he sent certified photocopies of Chambers’ new driver’s licence and the letter from Telstra. On the day Chambers’ birth certificate arrived by registered post from Sydney Nick used it to open a savings account at the Coburg branch of the Commonwealth Bank.
Already the name Nick Carmody seemed to belong to someone else—a colleague or an acquaintance he’d become used to not seeing. It joined the thousands of names that belonged to a past that was no longer his.
He remembered the first time he’d read his own byline in the Star—and his horror when he realised the story (EXTINCT TIGER BLAMED FOR MAULED SHEEP) was by a different Nick Carmody, an elderly stringer who filed occasional stories for the paper from Tasmania. Seeing his name over somebody else’s work had made his head spin. It seemed incredible that Nick Carmody could be a nineteen-year-old cadet journalist living with his parents in Maroubra as well as a seventy-two-year-old retired Tasmanian university lecturer. Nick felt that day as if something had been stolen from him—not just his name but his future. In a moment of reckless pretension he adopted the name of his then-favourite writer, the Polish émigré author of Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent. For a few months he laboured under the byline ‘By Nick Conrad Carmody’ until the retired lecturer died suddenly in his bed and Nick was free to become himself again.
You expected rain in Melbourne. But the place was dying of thirst. It was a city of parched lawns and dying trees and houses cracking from lack of moisture.
During his walks around Coburg Nick often passed a two-storey, honey-brick, colonnaded mansion in Wattle Grove, on the other side of Sydney Road. The house nestled behind a wrought-iron gate and a row of miniature fir trees that drew attention to its extravagance rather than concealing it. Sometimes Nick saw a taxi parked outside and now and then a heavily built, dark-haired, middle-aged man getting out of the taxi or preparing to drive it. Clearly the owner was rich enough to drive the taxi only when he felt like it.
Driving a taxi, it seemed to Nick, was the sort of practical, anonymous job that might suit Kevin Chambers for a while. He still had enough cash, he discovered, to sign up for an eight-day course with the CABS4U Driver Academy in Port Melbourne.
On the day he finished the course, Nick pressed the aluminium security buzzer beside the wrought-iron front gate of the mansion in Wattle Grove. The taxi was parked outside. A grey-haired man on a stepladder was shaping the miniature fir trees with electric shears.
The voice that answered the buzzer sounded foreign—Russian or East European, Nick thought.
‘Homolka,’ he said, as if answering a telephone.
‘My name is Kevin Chambers,’ said Nick.
‘Wh
at can I do for you, Mr Chambers?’
Homolka listened courteously before inviting Nick to come in.
Homolka was a Pole who’d taught economics at the University of Warsaw before escaping the Iron Curtain in the boot of a Trabant. Capitalism had been good to him. In twenty years he had made himself a rich man. As well as owning a taxi, he’d bought several run-down properties in suburbs of Melbourne that would soon become desirable.
House by house Homolka recounted the purchase price and current market value of his investment properties as he and Nick sat on the front porch, watching the old man on the stepladder. It seemed important to Homolka for Nick to know exactly how much he was worth.
‘You’re a lucky man,’ said Nick.
‘All mortgage, of course,’ replied Homolka. ‘Otherwise no need for taxi.’
He smiled and Nick smiled back.
‘Good money for old communist, yes?’
‘I thought it was only old communists who made money in your country.’
Homolka laughed, then frowned, then laughed again. ‘You—what—thirty years old?’
‘Close enough.’
‘How long you drive taxi?’
‘I won’t lie to you, Mr Homolka. I’ve just finished the course.’
‘What course?’
‘CABS4U Driver Academy.’
‘I never heard of this place.’
‘It’s in Port Melbourne.’
‘These people teach you drive taxi?’
‘More or less.’
‘Promise job afterwards?’
‘Yes.’
Homolka said something to the old man on the stepladder, and Nick realised that the gardener, too, was Polish. They exchanged some heated opinions before the old man switched off his electric shears and descended the stepladder and resumed the job with a pair of hand clippers. Then Homolka looked sideways. ‘Homolka teach you,’ he said. ‘Five hundred dollars.’
‘Thanks,’ said Nick. ‘But I’m qualified now.’
‘Four hundred fifty,’ said Homolka. ‘Cash.’
Nick didn’t reply. He wasn’t sure whether the Pole was pulling his leg or whether Homolka was serious about charging him to learn what he already knew. After an awkward silence Homolka took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and asked, ‘What is father?’